Canet d'en Berenguer seals restaurant Jesús Gor over noise: 6,001 euro fine
In Canet d'en Berenguer, a town neighbouring Sagunto in the Camp de Morvedre district, the council sealed the restaurant Jesús Gor on 2 October over noise. The closure is temporary: a 6,001 euro fine and a possible reopening in December.
The restaurant Jesús Gor, on Avenida Blasco Ibáñez in Canet d'en Berenguer, a short walk from the seafront promenade, has been closed since Friday 2 October. That day, between the evening and the night, Local Police officers put up the seals decided by the Junta de Gobierno Local (the board that handles municipal business between full council meetings). There is police tape across the entrance today. It is not a closure for good: it will open again once the problem is fixed and a technician measures the noise again and gives the all-clear, inside and outside the premises.
The resolution includes a penalty of 6,001 euros, and the licence will stay suspended until the required works are carried out. The figure is more than five times the previous one: on 13 May the council had fined the business 1,125 euros and temporarily taken away its activity permit.
The dates help explain the outcome. In June, a resident wrote to the council that, a full twelve months after her first letter, the noise was still reaching her home and those around it at any hour, «24 hours a day». She said she had picked up more than 80 decibels on her phone, a home-made figure that is not the same as an official measurement. New complaints were added from other residents and from owners' associations nearby. In the first days of August, the council asked for a check on whether the business had kept operating with its permit withdrawn, and the Local Police replied on the 18th with a report confirming it.
The restaurant then handed in an acoustic study of its own. The municipal engineer rejected it for three defects: night-time readings were missing, five air-conditioning units had been switched off while measuring, and nobody recorded the noise in the street. The report makes clear what that first test lacked.
Jesús Gor, the owner, tells the newspaper (El Periódico de Aquí, a local daily) that he accepts what has happened and acknowledges the council is right. He maintains, though, that in the height of summer the business did not let him stop for building work, and that he hoped to avoid the seal. With the season over, he plans to do the repairs as soon as possible, during the staff's break.
What remains unknown is when the new audit will take place. The newspaper puts the reopening in December, but the text gives no date for that check, on which everything else depends.
According to El Periódico de Aquí, which had access to the municipal file.
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