He was credited with — and blamed for — the invention of the package holiday, bringing millions of milk-skinned Britons to the Spanish costas and transforming Benidorm from a sleepy fishing village into the forest of concrete towers it is today.

Pedro Zaragoza Orts, the Mayor of Benidorm for 17 years in the 1950s and 1960s, died yesterday from heart failure at the age of 85, leaving Spaniards to ponder the remarkable transformation he helped unleash on their country. In the four decades he held office in the Costa Blanca town, Spain has moved from being an impoverished and deeply conservative country to one of the wealthiest and most and liberal nations in the world.

Hundreds of mourners attended the former mayor’s wake yesterday, hailing him as the “father of modern Benidorm” and a visionary who made Spain the tourism superpower it is today. More than 53 million tourists visit Spain a year, 16 million of whom are British.

Decreeing two days of official mourning, the current mayor, Manuel Pérez Fenoll, said: “Benidorm has suffered the loss of the person who laid the foundations of the city we know today. He was the architect of a model praised and recognised around the world as an example to follow.”

According to legend, it all began with a bikini. The trickle of European tourists that first landed on Spanish shores in the 1950s were banned from wearing the racy new swimwear under the conservative social mores of the dictator Francisco Franco. Civil guards wearing patent leather hats patrolled the beaches getting tourists to cover up; one outraged British tourist earnt a fine when she slapped a civil guard in response.

So Mr Zaragoza caused an uproar in 1950s Spain when he signed a decree allowing the bikini to be worn on Benidorm’s beaches. The Roman Catholic Church began excommunication proceedings against him, “a kind of social death” in the Spain of that era, he later recalled.

Facing imminent dismissal from his post, Mr Zaragoza hopped on his Vespa, stuffed newspaper down his shirt to protect him from the cold and sped nine hours to Madrid to see the Generalísmo himself. The mayor must have been persuasive because days later he won Franco’s approval for the bikini and Benidorm’s development as a tourist resort.

“He was the only one who helped me,” Mr Zaragoza recalled in Giles Tremlett’s book, Ghosts of Spain. “He asked me how I had come, whether by train or airplane, and I said no, on a Vespa. That surprised him.”

Eight days later, Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo, appeared in Benidorm with the Minister of Governance and his wife in tow. Mr Zaragoza was given a pass to enter the dictator’s palace in Madrid anytime he wished, and Franco’s wife began to visit the mayor’s house for two weeks every year.

The Catholic Church dropped its efforts to excommunicate Benidorm’s mayor, showing that foreign tourism had the ability to trump its awesome power in the Spain of that time. Tourists began to arrive from Britain, Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands, and the town’s population grew from 1,700 to 70,000 today.

Some writers and historians say those tourists brought with them the seeds of change that ultimately undermined Franco’s four-decade dictatorship. “Without the bikini there, quite possibly, would have been no modern Benidorm and, in fact, precious little tourism at all,” Mr Tremlett wrote.

“At this stage, had Spain not welcomed it, the nascent package tourism could easily have put its roots down elsewhere in the Mediterranean.”

For better or worse, Benidorm became an early blueprint for Spain’s booming tourist industry. With its 330 spindly skyscrapers jostling for space and blotting out the sunshine, Benidorm also became a byword for ugliness, a hulking great eyesore sat atop on what had been a beautiful stretch of coast.

But many environmentalists now look at Benidorm wistfully in light of the sprawling developments of boxy chalets that have since been built in Spain. Greenpeace reckons that the country’s coast is disappearing under concrete at the rate of three football pitches a day.

Mr Zaragoza Orts began his working life as a bellboy in a Madrid train station, but clearly had a way with powerful people. His personal papers, donated last year to the University of Alicante, reportedly contained correspondence with Franco, Charles de Gaulle, the Argentine strongman Juan Domingo Perón and Otto von Habsburg.

He remained a staunch supporter of Franco until the end, even requesting one of the dictator’s last remaining statues for his garden after it was uprooted from a Madrid plaza three years ago. But he did come to wonder whether the uncontrolled expansion he helped set in motion had been the best thing for Benidorm.

“Sometimes I weep when I walk around and see what some streets have become,” he lamented recently.

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