Lío has run its cabaret-and-club show on the Marina Ibiza waterfront for fifteen years, tables from 500 euros a head, a stage that looks like it floats on a pool, and a guest list that made it one of the island's most photographed rooms. Now it is packing up for the Ibiza Hotel Corso, near the Botafoc ferry terminal, with an opening pencilled in for 2027. The move itself is not the story. How it is being licensed is.
Why can't Lío just apply for a new club license?
It cannot, because Ibiza's town hall closed that door in 2023. The municipality's General Urban Planning Plan, the PGOU, bans the installation of any new discotheque or equivalent nightlife venue anywhere within Ibiza town, full stop, regardless of who is applying or how much revenue they bring. That ban is precisely why residents of neighbouring s'Illa Plana were startled to learn a venue with Lío's capacity and reputation was heading their way at all.
The answer, per reporting from Periódico de Ibiza and La Voz de Ibiza, is that the project is not filed as a new nightclub. The Hotel Corso already holds a license for "complementary activities", a category Spanish hospitality law reserves for services a hotel offers its own guests: a bar with ambient music, a small dance space alongside dinner service. Residents' lawyers argue that repurposing that license for a public-facing club with reserved tables, a produced stage show and a capacity built for the general market is not a complementary activity at all. It is a new one, filed under an old label.
"La ley se tiene que aplicar para todos." ("The law has to apply to everyone.") - Alberto Sánchez Runde, president of the Illa Plana Neighbors Association
What do the neighbours actually want, and how far will they go?
Beyond the legal argument, s'Illa Plana's residents point to something more immediate: their streets. The neighbourhood sits on a single-lane access road already squeezed by ferry traffic, taxis and cruise-ship passengers heading to and from the port every day between April and October. Adding a venue the scale of Lío, they say, turns a tight bottleneck into gridlock.
In April, residents asked the mayor's office for an urgent meeting and served notice they would formally request a review of the granted licenses. By June, the s'Illa Plana association had reorganized under a new board, retained lawyers, an engineer and an architect to dissect the paperwork, and gone public with their own conclusion: the license, in their reading, is legally null. The town hall has since twice paused construction work at the site, most recently after residents flagged a summer excavation ban that applies to tourist zones between June and September, and city technical staff are now reviewing the file directly. Nobody involved has ruled out taking the fight to court.
Lío, for its part, has not budged from its position that everything is in order. The company points to fifteen years of operating in Ibiza and describes the new venue as combining gastronomy, live performance and hospitality under "reserva previa, servicio en mesa, aforo controlado", reservation, table service, controlled capacity, language chosen to keep the project inside the hotel category rather than the banned nightclub one.
Why does a hotel loophole matter beyond one club?
Because if it works for Lío, it works for anyone who can buy the right hotel. Ibiza's nightclub ban was written to stop the island adding more mega-venues to an already saturated calendar, but a workaround built on "complementary activities" licensing would let any operator with capital sidestep that ban simply by acquiring hotel real estate instead of applying for a club permit outright. That is the precedent s'Illa Plana's lawyers are trying to head off, and it is why town hall's own review of the file, not just the residents' complaint, is the thing worth watching.
