What does the city's own report actually say?
On July 22, 2026, Ibiza's municipal architects handed the Consell d'Eivissa a technical review of the Lío Ibiza expansion at Hotel Corso, and it does not read like a rubber stamp. The report puts the project's real ground occupation at 4,400 square meters against a legal ceiling of 3,910 (15% of the 3,400-square-meter base footprint the hotel is allowed to build on). It calls the resulting defect "insubsanable," unfixable through paperwork corrections.
The gap opens because the footprint tables lean on a courtyard built over back in 1968, with no documented authorization on file. Fold that undocumented square footage into the base calculation and the project's overage shrinks on paper. Strip it out, and attorney Florencia de Gaetano's own math puts the true overage at 29.41%, roughly double the 14.73% figure the file shows.
How did a rejected plan become an approved one?
This is not the first time the numbers on this project failed to add up. On October 7, 2024, urbanism official Juan Flores signed a decree upholding an earlier denial of the same expansion, citing violations on height, occupancy and buildability under ordinary planning rules.
The project did not die there. Developer Turismo Balear came back through a different door: the "covid decree," a pandemic-era clause in Law 2/2020 written to help hotels modernize, which exempts qualifying projects from exactly the zoning restrictions that had just blocked the application. City hall approved the technical report on February 4, 2026, and issued the license five days later. The same administration, under Mayor Rafael Triguero, has separately blocked new nightclub licenses in Marina Ibiza's port a short walk away, arguing the zone cannot bear the load.
Why did residents wait 16 months to find out?
Municipal records show the city knew about the reform plans since at least October 2024. Neighbors only learned in a meeting in late February 2026, when Lío Ibiza's artistic director showed up to present a project residents were told was already a done deal.
"City hall only learns the details when they become public or notorious."
That was Triguero's answer when residents pressed him on the irregularities at the meeting, alongside a request for "time" and an insistence the process had been "transparent from the first moment." He fielded seven separate resident questions about the file and answered none of them directly.
What happens next?
The file now sits with the Consell d'Eivissa, which asked the city for verification on July 2, 2026, and got back its own architects' "unfixable" finding three weeks later. De Gaetano's public urban-action request asks the island council to revoke the license outright. Lío has planned a 2027 opening for the roughly 500-capacity club attached to the 300-room hotel, replacing a 1996 license that covered just 488 square meters and explicitly excluded nightclub use.
