Ibiza City Hall Is on Its Third Legal Excuse in Six Months to Save the Corso Megaclub. Two Courts Are Now Deciding If Any of Them Hold.

In August, TTH reported that Ibiza's town hall had admitted the licensing math behind the Corso megaclub was "unfixable," after sitting on the problem for 16 months. That admission didn't kill the project. It sent the town hall looking for a new legal foundation, and per La Voz de Ibiza's reporting, it has now tried three.

What's the town hall's new legal theory?

On February 9, the council argued the club at Corso was a pre-existing dance hall, grandfathered into the site. When that didn't hold, it pivoted on July 7 to a different theory: the venue was merely a hotel service, not a public nightclub subject to the same licensing regime. That argument fell apart too. On August 28, the town hall unveiled theory number three: the Corso operation is an autonomous public dance hall, legally justified by resurrecting a decades-old license.

Three legal theories in six months, each contradicting the last, is not what a functioning licensing process looks like. It's what a council looks like when it has already decided on the outcome and is working backward for a justification that survives a courtroom.

Why does a 1997 license matter?

The license the town hall dug up dates to 1997. Per La Voz de Ibiza, it was issued for a space of just 488 square meters, with a hard cap of 365 people. The Corso project it's now being asked to legitimize covers 2,484 square meters, nearly five times the footprint the original permit ever authorized.

Stretching a capacity-capped, space-capped 1990s dance-hall license to cover a 2026 megaclub is the kind of legal contortion that invites exactly the scrutiny it's now getting. The Consell opened a 10-day public allegation period on September 1 specifically on this third theory, and two separate lawsuits, procedure 39/2026 in Palma's Court of First Instance No. 4 and procedure 85/2026 in Court No. 1, are already testing whether it holds. A construction-ban deadline is reportedly closing in around September 30, which explains the urgency behind theory after theory: whichever one is still standing when that date hits determines whether the build can continue.

What are the courts and the opposition saying?

While the courts weigh the paperwork, the town hall's own opposition says it can't even see it. Councillor Guadalupe Nauda, per La Voz de Ibiza, has formally requested the case file and been denied. PSOE and Unidas Podemos have jointly demanded an urgent committee session to force the administration to account for a project that has now survived three separate, incompatible legal rationales without a single one surviving unchallenged.

"Tres argumentos distintos en seis meses," three different arguments in six months, is how La Voz de Ibiza summed up the town hall's approach. That phrase alone tells you the level of confidence behind any of them.

For an industry watching Ibiza's licensing machinery up close, the pattern matters more than any single legal theory: when a council needs three tries to justify one project, and locks its own opposition out of the file while it tries, the story stops being about a single megaclub and starts being about how license approvals get manufactured on the island.