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IT may have scrubbed up in recent years, but Magaluf was once the party capital of Europe, with thousands of Brits searching for sun, sea and sex.
The coastal town in Majorca, Spain, was flooded every summer by randy teenagers, who were easy targets for reps trying to flog them cheap drinks and cheaper thrills.
Amid the bustling strip of boozers was the Magaluf club Playhouse, whose former owner hit the headlines last month after being accused of a fake holiday sickness scam that defrauded hotels out of £9.5million.
The venue was previously fined after a British tourist was filmed performing sex acts on 24 men for a cheap drink in the summer of 2014 – leading to its closure and stricter laws that brought an end to the island’s debauched parties.
Gia Clarke, 28, from Leeds, used to sell tickets for the infamous event Carnage, which passed through Playhouse during its wild all-night bar crawls.
Sharing her memories, she tells The Sun how the crawl was “pure and utter chaos” , before events got out of hand and she realised “they had gone too far”.
‘Never going home’
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Gia was 19 when she started working for the Carnage events back in 2013.
Following a week of fun on her first friends’ holiday, she decided to stay out on the island – much to her mum’s annoyance.
Gia explains: “I didn’t like the pub I was working at and didn’t want to leave Magaluf, so I decided not to.
“My mum was like, ‘You better come home!’ but I didn’t.
“The only problem I had was money and that’s how I stumbled upon ticket-selling for Carnage.”
Hotel tricks
Gia recalls earning €10 (£8.90) commission from every ticket sold, which was miles better than shot girl jobs that made 50 cents (44p) per sale.
She said: “You’d likely sell 10 tickets a day so that’s €100 (£88), which is a lot for a 19-year-old in Majorca. It felt like being a millionaire.”
But flogging tickets wasn’t as easy as it appeared, because hotels were desperate to sign up eager Brits on their own bar crawls.
Gia said: “We used to have to sneak into hotels. They were partnered up with different events and bar crawls so we had to be clever.
“There was a lot of competition between the reps but people knew of Carnage and how wild it was. They wanted that experience, so we found a way to sell them tickets.
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“It didn’t always work out. I remember going into one hotel and they called both security and the police and searched me.”
Once they were inside the hotels, there was another challenge – finding a way to get to the guests.
Gia recalled: “They used to send us doorknocking, so every night we were crawling around hotels trying to sell tickets.
“I would knock on every single hotel room. If a group of guys answered I’d put on the charm but if it was girls, I’d say, ‘Sorry wrong room.’”
‘Wildest crawl’
Gia recalls the Magaluf strip being flooded with partygoers during the busiest times in the season – and most visitors were hunting for Carnage events.
She said: “In August it was so busy you could barely move down the strip. There were hundreds and hundreds of people.
“We had the biggest bar crawl ever. It was the best one and I’m glad I worked for it – even though it was a mess.
“All the others were very tame. Our biggest selling point was that our crawl was a bit naughty.”
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Carnage quickly earned a reputation for wild, boozy nights and risque games.
Gia recalls: “During the games, they would go into the crowds to find a guy and a girl, bring them up on stage and get them to do dares to win a bottle of vodka or other alcohol.
“It was a very ‘lads, lads, lads’ kind of environment and there would be things like lap dances, taking shots from each others’ mouths and getting into lots of sex positions.
“Sometimes I’d see people having full-on sex on the crawls too.
“There was obviously a sexual element, but people went to Magaluf to let their hair down and be wild.
“We used to record these wild antics to help us to sell tickets. We would show them to men in hotels and they loved it.”
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Cheeky promises
While they lured in customers offering free drinks, Gia explains customers got way less than they realised.
“It would be worded cleverly so that it sounded like free drinks all night, but did not sell itself as an all-inclusive bar,” she recalled.
“They were just getting cheap apple sours poured into their mouths. It caught out a lot of people out but they all had a fun time.”
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Bar rivalries
Gia described the tour as “the devil” at times due to the saucy antics and revealed some venues refused to let them in.
“There was a lot of competition between the bars and some had rivalries. They would have beef with each other,” she said.
“If they knew you were going to one bar they would turn you away and not let you into their venue because you worked with their enemies.
“The bar workers used to say ‘No possible!’, which led to me getting an embarrassing drunken tattoo of those words on my bum.”
Booze troubles
After a few too many drinks, Gia says some of the partygoers would end up in strip clubs and it didn’t always end well.
She says strippers could make up to €6,000 (£5,300) a week during the busiest times and earned so much money that they could take half a year off.
Gia said: “Strippers used to stand outside in front of the clubs in their bras and knickers to lure men in. It may sound bad, but I saw way worse on Carnage bar crawls.
“I know strippers have been thrown up on many times from the guys drinking too much, there was a lot of chundering.
“I remember someone nearly drank a shot glass filled with sick because they picked it up and didn’t know what it was.”
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Walk of shame
Like with any bar crawl, not everyone made it to the end but with Carnage there was an easy tell-tale sign for those who dropped out.
Gia said: “Obviously you would lose guests on the bar crawl and would get a few stragglers who dropped off too.
“But a lot of times, the next morning you’d see a random guy or girl doing the walk of shame along the beach.
“It was obvious they had been on the crawl because they were still wearing their Carnage top. I did it a few times myself too.”
Maga’s makeover
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Carnage came under fire after footage of a woman performing sex acts on multiple men during one of their crawls emerged online.
It was claimed the 18-year-old believed she was going to win a free holiday – which turned out to be a cocktail named holiday that cost less than a fiver.
The bar where it happened and Carnage were fined a joint sum of £43,500, and the council hoped to shut them down.
“They started pushing it more and more, seeing what they could get people to do sexually,” Gia explains.
“When I started they were getting girls to do fun stuff but towards the end was when they were milking it.
That’s when the video came out of the girl. I realised they had gone too far.
“They were all ‘lads, lads, lads’ and thought they could get away with it. I wasn’t surprised when it was shut down, would anyone be?”
In the years that followed, Magaluf tried to change its reputation and enforce stricter laws.
“They have given it a makeover too,” Gia said. “It’s very Instagrammable and they have got rid of the dingy bar crawls for nicer places.
“They are trying to be the new Ibiza but they’re missing the point. You want Maga to be disgusting.”
