The multi-million dollar underwater ship museum planned for Portocristo has been cancelled and will not be built.

PalmThere will be no underwater reef at the entrance to the port of Portocristo. The underwater museum with replicas of old ships, intended to attract cultural and adventure tourism to the town, has been definitively scrapped. This was announced on Monday by the Tourism Delegate of the Manacor City Council, Júlia Acosta, who, after several meetings, decided to abandon the initial project with a budget of two million euros, which was touted during the previous legislative term as the municipality's major investment using European funds.

At the end of 2022, the Manacor City Council received a European grant of two million euros from the Next Generation EU funds to create and manage an underwater archaeology park. This park was also intended to serve as a reef to regenerate the marine fauna at the port entrance, which had been severely affected for decades by rice fishing nets. The project, processed by the Tourism Department, was initially slated for completion within three years, although a one-year extension was granted to try and revive an initiative that, from the outset, seemed overly ambitious. The museum was to reproduce, at full scale, four historic ships, based on local remains studied by the Balearic Institute of Underwater Archaeology Studies (IBEAM). It also aimed to restore biodiversity and marine fauna in an area devastated and impoverished as a result of over-extraction of marine resources, as well as modules to improve ecological connectivity between ships and marine areas of the Natura 2000 Network.

The project began with a scale model of the Roman ship Les Llumetes, approximately 20 meters long, which transported fish sauce (garum) between Baetica and Rome in the 1st century AD. The sixth phase of this study has now been completed. This will not only help us understand what the ship might have looked like in its time, but will also contribute to the regeneration and creation of a kind of marine sanctuary. It is hoped that this sanctuary will eventually include other scale models of ships known to have sunk in Portocristo between the 1st and 20th centuries, including another Roman ship and a Byzantine vessel.

Modified

Acosta explains that there is still a project underway in the permitting phase; a modified version of the initial plan that must be ready by June of this year at the latest, and which must not, under any circumstances, take the underwater reef into account: "The premise is that not a single euro will be returned and that we will meet the deadline," although he declined to reveal how the funds will be invested or if they will be invested in the coastal area. "It was a sensitive project that depended on authorizations from the Coastal Authority, the Water Resources Department, the Maritime Authority… in a previous plenary session, we already informed them that we would not continue with the initial project due to technical, legal, and administrative constraints," he states.