Més per Palma has submitted a request to halt the service of tourist carriages until all the carriages and horses pass the annual inspection. The party claims that the City Council did not schedule the reviews before the summer.
Més per Palma has called on Thursday for the precautionary suspension of the horse-drawn carriage service in the city until all carriages and animals have passed the mandatory annual review. The ecosoberanist party denounces that the City Council has allowed the carriages to operate during the tourist season without having undergone these checks.
The municipal group has filed a request demanding that the service be suspended until it is verified that the carriages and horses meet the technical, veterinary, and administrative requirements established by the municipal regulations for urban passenger transport with animal-drawn vehicles.
According to Més, the annual review should be conducted before the start of the season to ensure that the carriages meet the required technical and safety conditions and that the horses are in an appropriate physical and veterinary state to provide the service. However, the party asserts that the City Council did not schedule these inspections before the summer.
Inspections in September, when the season ends
The scheduling, as Més claims, was not published until July 2 and sets the inspections for September 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 21, when the high season will practically be over. The party's spokesperson in Palma, Neus Truyol, has accused the PP government team of turning "a preventive inspection into a mere bureaucratic procedure."
"Conducting inspections in September is to admit that throughout the tourist season the carriages have operated without the City Council verifying whether they met the safety and animal welfare conditions required by its own regulations," Truyol stated. The spokesperson considered this situation to be "a serious irresponsibility."
Truyol reminded that the carriages share public roads with buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians, so not passing the mandatory annual review "unnecessarily increases risks to road safety" and calls into question the control over the condition of the carriages and horses.
"Like a car without an ITV"
"Can you imagine a car driving without passing the ITV? Well, this is the same thing," Truyol pointed out, accusing the municipal government of "putting tourist interests ahead of safety and animal welfare." Més per Palma demands that the inspections be carried out urgently and that the City Council make the results of the inspections public, detailing the incidents detected, the corrective measures taken, and the authorisations granted.
"The regulations do not foresee inspections to comply with an administrative file; they are foreseen to protect people and animals. If these inspections are done when the season is already ending, they have completely lost their function," Truyol concluded. So far, the City Council has not commented on the request for precautionary suspension.
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