A Scottish politician has called for the closure of an “utterly vile” Spanish website that ranks countries by the number of their tourists who have died or been injured after falls from balconies.
The intervention by Christina McKelvie, the MSP for Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse, comes days after the death of a Scottish law student who was born in a constituency represented by McKelvie.
Emma Ramsay, 19, was on holiday in Ibiza when she reportedly fell from a sixth-floor hotel balcony. Police in Spain said the fall was being treated as an accident.
Responding to the news of Ramsay’s death on social media, a group calling itself the Balearics Federation of Balconing appeared to celebrate what it termed the “comeback” of British tourists on its ongoing rankings of deaths and injuries resulting from balcony falls on the Balearic islands.
It accompanied the post with a detailed chart that awarded nations points for balcony-linked deaths and injuries of their citizens. Britain appeared at the top with seven points, followed by Germany and Spain.
“The British NEVER disappoint,” it told its more than 55,000 followers. “Everyone trusted that the kings of this sport would once again be leaders.”
McKelvie, who earlier this year was appointed as Scotland’s minister for drugs and alcohol policy, hit out at the website. “This is utterly vile and my heart goes out to the loved ones of anyone who has been targeted by this organisation,” she said. “It is reprehensible that anyone would seek to exploit and use tragic deaths in such a cruel manner.”
She continued: “The sooner the organisation is shut down, the better, and social media organisations should take any action they can to remove such deplorable content from their sites.”
McKelvie’s office stressed that the comments were made in her capacity as an MSP, rather than as a Scottish government minister.
The “federation”, which describes itself online as “Darwinistically tourist-phobic”, appears to have been keeping records of falls among international and domestic tourists to the Balearic islands since 2000.
Part of its name refers to the term balconing, coined in Spain after a spate of serious incidents arising from holidaymakers’ attempts to jump into swimming pools from balconies. On its website, the group noted that it had expanded on this definition to include all vertical falls.
The group did not reply to a request for comment from the Guardian.
However, it did post a response to a Spanish media report on McKelvie’s call for it to be shut down. The problem was not its rankings, it insisted, but rather the region’s model of “mass tourism” and the “consequences” that stemmed from this model, it said.
