Porreres Town Hall evacuated due to the poor condition of the building

The Porreres Town Hall will undergo a forced relocation and will be installed with all the personnel from the different municipal services in the Museum and Artistic Fund building. The serious structural problems that the building in Plaça de la Vila is suffering from, which forced an emergency shoring of the ground floor and the first floor in the autumn of 2024, have led the City Council to make a drastic decision: to completely evacuate the municipal offices to face a solution and at the same time guarantee the safety of workers and residents.

The relocation, as explained by the mayor of Porreres, Maria Agnès Sampol, does not yet have a date. In any case, it will not be until well after the summer that administrative activity will be fully transferred to the Museum and Artistic Fund building, located at Carrer d’Agustí Font Prevere, number 23. The historic Town Hall will remain completely empty awaiting knowledge of its future.

The problems of the property worsened notably due to the water leaks caused by the heavy rains at the end of the summer of 2024, which seriously deteriorated the old joists and wooden beams that support the floor. Although public attention could be maintained until now thanks to the installed props, the situation now requires a definitive large-scale intervention that in no case can be faced with the building operational.

Reform?

At this time, the fate of the emblematic building in the square is in the hands of experts. Technicians from the Consell de Mallorca have already gone to the property to collect its dimensions and thoroughly assess the real state of the structure. These tasks will serve to draft a definitive technical report that will determine the scope of the intervention: whether the old Town Hall can undergo comprehensive rehabilitation or if, on the contrary, the damage is so deep that it will have to be completely demolished to be rebuilt anew.

Once the diagnosis from the report is known, the relevant construction project will be drafted. The government team already assumes that the economic cost of these works will be of such great magnitude that the Council will not be able to face it alone with the resources of the local budget. For this reason, it will be essential to knock on the doors of other supramunicipal administrations, such as the Consell de Mallorca itself and the Government of the Balearic Islands, to obtain extra financial aid to finance the project.

A long move

The complexity of the bureaucratic procedures, the drafting of the project, the search for funding, and the execution of works of this magnitude suggest that the process will be long. For all these reasons, everything indicates that Porreres' municipal offices and services will be located in the Museum building for "some years," turning this cultural space into the provisional administrative heart of the municipality.