The Real Club Nautico de Palma is located on the side of the Club Nautico de Ibiza in defense of its historical facilities (Photo published by Tripulante18)

A society such as the Ibiza Nautical Club, which in just over two years will meet the centenary of its foundation, is in danger of disappearing because of a misunderstood mercantilism that only looks at the monetary side and that totally forgets the sports, cultural and social work it does; values that it has sought to inculcate along its path.

The port d'Eivissa, which has always been the center of the city, has gradually been privatized and today only the Ibiza Nautical Club remains for the Iberian. The granting of authorisations to build seaports, to grant uses to commercial societies of the old routes... has caused the ibicencos to lose the use of the maritime facade.

The Autoritat Portuària de Balears has managed to turn the port of Vila into a solar, destroying for Eivissa the square of sea and reference for the history of the island that always was the Puerto El Club Náutico is the last trench left to us that we appreciate the traditional ibicencos values and this entity is seriously threatened by a desire to get new canons for the Autoritat Portuària de Balears.

Throughout its 100 years of existence, the Ibiza Nautical Club has always been distinguished by transversality, where the most humble inhabitants of neighborhoods such as sa Penya have been related to the most prominent personalities of Pitiusa society. Likewise, everyone has had room regardless of their beliefs and ideas. All have lived together in harmony and with a fraternal sense, which unfortunately, on our island, is disappearing.

The Ibiza Nautical Club has always been an open society that has welcomed everyone.

The Ibiza Nautical Club was born on February 27, 1925 in order to facilitate the nautical activities to all the ibicencos interested in the sea. Sports activities quickly gained importance: boat-to-row races, sailing boats - popularly known as bruix-. In the 1940s the Snipe arrived, with which the Iberian athletes achieved remarkable successes even outside the island.

In the late 1960s, the Optimist i arrived shortly after the 420, in which they learned to sail generations of young people and continued to compete in races outside Ibiza. All this thanks to the Club's sailing school, where students who have successfully reached the highest world competitions: Olympic diplomas, European champions...

The Jóvens per la Mar programme is a cultural and environmental programme for compulsory secondary education students. All this has been achieved thanks to the contributions of the Club's partners and partners, which with their quotas - except for specific and limited public subsidies - allow these sports and social activities to be carried out.

If in distant times social activities were mainly the dance evenings and social meetings, excursions to islets and emblematic places on the Pitiusa coast, today social activity is focused on opening the sea to people who ignored the playful and therapeutic function of the sea, such as the program A sea of possibilitats, created in 2006, with the participation of about 165 people each year with physical, mental or sensory disabilities. The cultural aspect of the many exhibitions of painting and photography, literary presentations, conferences and other activities that complement the essential work of the Club must also be pointed out: to encourage the fattening of the sea. The Ibiza Nautical Club is certainly the social and sports reference, thanks to this non-profit entity, which invests the modest quotas of its partners in all kinds of social and sports activities.

It can hardly be understood that the Iberian society can afford to dispense with a collective with more than 1,100 partners, more than 175 federal licenses, 500 students from the sailing school each year, 300 moorings of small length that allow anyone to enjoy the sea. It seems that the Autoritat Portuària de les Balears has not found a way to make economic performance compatible with social, cultural and sports work, which only wants to bring the sea closer to all social classes and bury the stereotype that the sea is only for the potentates.

The 2009 d'Or Medal of the city of Eivissa or the Premi Ramon Llull, awarded by the Govern Balear, among many other decorations, are a guarantee of the way of being of the Club. The actions of the end of 2009 are to be repeated, when the City Council of Eivissa, the Consell Insular of Eivissa, the Parlament of the Illes Balears and the Congress of Deputies unanimously expressed their support for the Ibiza Nautical Club and its sports and social role. Today it is essential to recover that spirit and we call on the institutions, political parties, associations and social fabric to find among all the legal formulas that will allow a long life for the Ibiza Nautical Club. And not only for the partners, but for the entire Iberian society.

At the moment, the Ibiza Nautical Club is in a competition process in which we have denounced a series of maneuvers contrary to the spirit of the competition, formally aimed at expelling it from the port. We demand that the Administration show a sensitivity to the true social nautical and the right of the ibicencos to access the sea and avoid continuing with the commercial dynamics of the Port.

For the above, the Ibiza Nautical Club requests:

1) That in the port of the city of Eivissa a space is reserved for the social nautical, as has been in the last 97 years by the Club Náutico Ibiza, as well as with training practices in the sailing and other activities for people who suffer some kind of functional diversity in the population of the island.

2) The requirement that at the stages of the competition involve entities with experience and solvency in the social nautical, excluding companies created ad hoc without any knowledge and which only seek economic profitability, with clearly crematistic objectives and not social reinvestment.

Dear friends and partners, we cannot allow the death of an entity like the Ibiza Nautical Club, which would represent the end of an Iberian society and in a very our way of understanding human life and relations, and therefore of its coexistence.

Let's get out of here!