Charlie Smith
A ROMANTIC evening has ended in disaster after a young couple suffered third degree burns from an exploding cocktail.
Police are investigating the May 3 incident that led to a Swedish woman, 33, being airlifted to hospital, while her partner, 34, was also hospitalised, along with a German man, 48.
The female expat was ‘most affected’, according to witnesses, after her silk dress caught fire when the flaming Captain Jack Sparrow cocktail ignited.
“The couple literally went up in flames,” said one fellow reveller at Santa Catalina’s El Neo bar, in Carrer de la Boteria.
He added that the burning woman ‘stripped to her waist and fled outside’.
“Frightened, hurt, naked and going into shock she was literally left to sit outside on the pavement,” she added.
The witness also claimed the bar does not have a water tap and that ‘customers had to use drinking water to help douse the flames’.
A Policia Nacional spokesperson told the Olive Press they are now ‘trying to find out more details’ about the contents of the drink.
According to El Neo’s menu, the cocktail contains rum, pineapple juice, passion fruit, overproof rum and cinnamon, and sells for €9.
The owner of El Neo told the Olive Press that ‘it was an accident and everything was quickly brought under control’.
She insisted the bar ‘does have a tap’.
The female victim was taken by air ambulance to the burns unit at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, while the two men were treated at Palma’s Son Espases.
