There will be no Flexas festival in the Parc de la Mar: they denounce lack of help from Cort

PalmaThe traditional Flexas festival will not be held this year in Parc de la Mar. After being declared a festival of municipal interest last year, the Palma City Council has withdrawn its support for the organization of the event. The decision comes amid controversy over the LGTBIQ+ Pride celebration and represents a new blow to two of the main spaces linked to the visibility and celebration of queer culture.

The organizers of the well-known Palma venue announced this Thursday that they are giving up on organizing the 22nd anniversary celebration at the public venue after weeks of talks with the Palma City Council to try to find a way to make its continuation possible.

The organizers believe that the growth of the party, which last year brought together around 15,000 people, has reached a point where management requires a much more solid structure. Aspects such as security, infrastructure, technical production, permits, insurance, and prevention plans involve more and more economic and human resources.

Flexas states that for years he has sustained the project thanks to personal effort, collaboration with contacts, and a large amount of invisible work, but warns that a massive event of these dimensions cannot continue to fall exclusively on two people. According to those responsible for the venue, the continuity of the party in the Parc de la Mar would require greater involvement from public administrations to ensure "sustainable and safe conditions" for both the organization and the attending public.

According to the organizers, Palma has different lines of public support for cultural activities, events, and city projects. Regarding this, they consider that a project that has been "activating public spaces, creating cultural fabric, and bringing together thousands of people for more than 20 years also deserves to be heard, cared for, and accompanied".

Furthermore, they explain that out of respect for the city of Palma and its people, for the City Council team, and for themselves, they believe that this year "the most responsible thing to do is to pause rather than assume unviable and inconsistent conditions".

Cort offered a contribution of 45,000 euros

In response to this issue, the Palma City Council has regretted the cancellation by bar Flexas of the celebration, but has highlighted that Cort has offered "continuous support" to the organization. It highlights the technical, logistical, and economic support offered by the Consistory to facilitate the celebration of the event. Cort assures that it proposed to assume the organizational burden of the event, including full responsibility for logistics and the development of the Self-Protection Plan required for this type of mass celebrations.

An contribution of up to 45,000 euros was also offered for the organization of the party, in addition to ceding the management of the drink bars to the organizing entity.

The Palma council states that since the beginning of the legislature, the City Council has not only maintained municipal support for this celebration – declared of municipal interest last year – but has significantly reinforced it. So much so that the nominative subsidy allocated to bar Flexas has been increased, placing it among the highest received by a cultural entity in the city.

Likewise, the City Council has actively collaborated in dialogue with the Council of Mallorca to facilitate the entity's access, for the first time, to new supramunicipal subsidy lines, which have finally been granted.

"Incompetence and LGTBIphobia"

On the other hand, the Ben Amics collective has accused the Palma City Council of turning the Pride festival into a "horabauxa" (a kind of show or spectacle) for tourists. This is how the spokesperson for the entity, Jan Gómez, stated in the Palma City Council plenary session this Thursday, during an intervention in which he denied that Ben Amics had rejected the organization of the festival "for economic interests or electoralism." According to him, the cancellation occurred "with great sadness" and due to the agreed incompetence and LGTBIfobia" of Mayor Martínez.

Gómez has reacted like this to the announcement this Wednesday by the Palma City Council that a festival is being prepared for next June 27.

The spokesperson for Ben Amics has rejected what he has considered the "dismantling of LGTBI policies" and the "precariousness" in the organization of the festival, in relation to the obstacles that, according to him, have been encountered since they made the first request for public space occupation.