Magaluf miracle as Scots teen survives 40ft fall

Jack Fairbairn, 19, was with three friends when he fell from the third floor on to a concrete surface near a swimming pool just before 6am on Wednesday.

He was rushed to the Son Espases Hospital with head and arm injuries and was reported to be in a serious condition.

But last night, it emerged he had needed only four stitches inserted in a head wound.

At the family home in Kelso, Roxburghshire, his mother, Helen, said he had been extremely fortunate to escape serious injury.

The 46-year-old nursery nurse said: “He is a very lucky boy. He fell from a third-floor balcony but he is going to be OK.

“However, he can’t come home as he has got stitches in a head injury. But I don’t really want to go into what happened.”

Friend Colin Adams posted a picture of Jack recovering in hospital on social networking site Facebook and wrote: “Luckiest lad alive. Falls off our third-floor balcony and all that’s wrong with him is four stitches in his head. Never been so happy to see somebody again. First night was a bit mental.”

Jack, who previously worked as a golf greenkeeper, had flown to Majorca a few hours earlier in the hope of finding summer work.

Police are investigating the possibility he lost his balance while trying to leap between balconies or attempting to jump into the swimming pool, a practice dubbed “balconing”, which has become popular on YouTube.

It has been blamed for a string of deaths and near-misses involving British holidaymakers in resorts such as Magaluf and San Antonio on the neighbouring island of Ibiza.

Three British nationals were killed in Magaluf in balcony falls in April and May 2012, in the worst run of deaths of their kind in the resort.

And in March this year, a popular Scots football coach died after falling from a fifth-floor balcony in Spain.

Bank worker Morgan Lynn, 25, from Edinburgh, had been on holiday with two friends when she plunged from her hotel in Benidorm at 3am.

The incident involving Mr Fairbairn happened at the resort’s beachfront Nova I apartments. These are just 200 metres from the brash Punta Ballena strip where an 18-year-old British holidaymaker was filmed recently performing a sex act on 24 men in a bar during a Carnage Magaluf pub crawl.

That incident made headlines across Europe and has sparked a backlash from island authorities against such nights.

Yesterday, Manuel Onieva, the mayor of Calvia, the region which includes Magaluf and five other resorts popular with Britons, said he had passed a law “giving us tighter control over the operation of pub crawl organisers”.

The controversial Carnage Magaluf firm boasts “four hours of unlimited drinking, four hours of unlimited free shots” on its nights-out.

Mr Onieva also said a police investigation had started into last week’s incident, adding that he wished to “express my total rejection and anger at the activities which were carried out in a video”.