Efforts to save the Sporting d’Hiver in Monaco seen as futile

As protests go, it was tiny: just a handful of people gathering quietly at a condemned building they thought should not be torn down. But in a place where dissent is rare, the demonstration was radical.

It also was futile, given that the protest was aimed at a company controlled by the entity that controls just about everything, Monaco's royal family.

"There's nothing, really, that anybody can do," said Elizabeth Wessel, a fashion designer opposed to the demolition of the 81-year-old Sporting d'Hiver, a former gambling club and one of the region's last remaining art deco buildings, to make way for a vast development backed by the royal family's business interests.

Claude Rosticher, 77, a painter who organised the September demonstration, said: "The principality always has the final word."

Monaco seems the most benign of places. A slice of unreality on the French Riviera that is smaller than a square mile and has a population of about 36,000; a per capita income of more than US$150,000; and an unemployment rate of zero.

Home to a collection of super-rich foreigners attracted to its pleasant climate and even more pleasant policy of not charging income tax, it is governed as a kind of consensual dictatorship by Prince Albert II, 55, a former playboy who took over after his father, Prince Rainier, died in 2005. Albert is wealthy, with Forbes estimating his fortune at US$1 billion two years ago.