Playa de Palma restaurants demand answers after power cuts hit peak weekend

Playa de Palma's restaurants and bars spent the busiest weekend of the summer fighting blackouts instead of serving guests. Between July 17 and 19, the seafront strip between Can Pastilla and Balneario 6 saw a string of voltage drops and outright power cuts, with two separate failures leaving around 2,000 customers without electricity, according to Última Hora. By July 19, roughly 634 customers in the zone were still without power.

For kitchens mid-service on a Saturday night, that meant extractor hoods, fryers, cold rooms and payment systems going dark all at once. Some businesses had to close outright; others ran on reduced menus while they worked out what stock they'd lost. Restauración Mallorca CAEB, the trade association representing the area's bars and restaurants, says the outages weren't a one-off. Businesses had already reported voltage drops and sporadic cuts the week before, pointing to a deeper problem with the local grid.

CAEB has pointed to Endesa, the utility that supplies the area, and is demanding a full, transparent account of what went wrong and what the company plans to do to stop it happening again, according to both Última Hora and the Majorca Daily Bulletin. The association, led by president Juan Miguel Ferrer, is now collecting documentation from affected businesses to weigh legal action over spoiled stock and lost trade during one of the highest-earning weekends of the season. Endesa has said crews are removing temporary generators used during the fix, and that residents and businesses may notice brief interruptions while the network reconnects.

Abone, the Balearic association representing leisure and entertainment venues, joined CAEB in raising the alarm, according to the Majorca Daily Bulletin. Neither outlet named individual restaurants affected, but the geographic scope, the whole Playa de Palma seafront from Can Pastilla to Balneario 6, covers one of Mallorca's densest concentrations of bars and restaurants.