BENIDORM attracted few visitors in the 1950s. With no running water, roads or hotels, few people wanted to enjoy its spectacular bay, golden sands and seemingly endless sunshine.
But Pedro Zaragoza Orts, the mayor, had a vision — a vision that coincided with the birth of the package holiday. He saw an invasion of sun-hat-wearing, sandalled northern Europeans flying south for a new holiday experience.
But there were obstacles in his path and he was brave enough to tackle them. The result — even those who are instinctively appalled by Benidorm — was spectacular. For locals it is a genuine miracle.
There is no better symbol of that miracle, with all its glaring faults, than the Hotel Bali. Fifty-two floors, 186m (610ft) high, it is one of the tallest buildings in Europe.
As you draw closer to the town from the south, the Bali is joined in the distance by an army of skinny skyscrapers. They look like a hundred matchsticks standing on end. Some are so thin and tall that one wonders whether a strong gust of wind might not blow them down. Fifty years ago, this was a modest beach-side village, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended lemon, olive, carob and citrus trees. In 1950 there were four or five small fondas, pensiones and hotels for the odd commercial traveller or for families from Madrid and Barcelona who came to spend the summer.
“We didn’t call it turismo back then, we called it veraneo, ‘summering’. We got the word ‘tourism’ later, from the Swiss,” Zaragoza told me when I visited him on his 81st birthday in the town.
When I met him, this largely unreconstructed Francoist was still fighting fit and a passionate defender of what had happened to his village. His appointment as mayor had little to do with democracy and everything to do with the Franco regime. A certificate showing his appointment as provincial head of Franco’s Movimiento Nacional sits on the office wall where, when I went to see him, he still did a bit of lawyering.
He has an almost messianic view of tourism as a way of promoting understanding between peoples and cultures. He is also one of the few Spaniards alive to have had an excommunication process started against him.
The blame for that lies with the bikini. “Without asking permission from anyone, I signed a municipal order authorising the wearing of bikinis,” he explained. “So the archbishop started an excommunication process. In those days, excommunication was a form of civil death. It meant you could not take entry exams for official jobs, nor become a university student. You become a leper in society.”
This was in 1959, when the first fruits of his dream that Benidorm might become a tourist resort were beginning to ripen.
Tall, blonde northern Europeans were arriving in their caravans or off the first package-holiday flights to Valencia airport. To the dismay of a clergy that already considered beaches a moral danger to the nation, they also wore the then voluminous two-piece swimsuits.
The Civil Guard would sometimes order them to cover up, especially if a bikini was spotted off the beach. An English woman was fined for slapping a police officer who insisted that she put a shirt on. Zaragoza’s friends in high places turned their backs on him when he took on the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church. Two government ministers backed the excommunication campaign. So, one day, he got up at 4am, stuffed some newspaper down his shirt to keep out the cold and got on his Vespa.
He rode it for the nine hours it took to get to Madrid and went to see Franco.
“He was the only one who helped me. He asked me how I had come, whether by train or aeroplane, and I said no, on a Vespa. That surprised him,” Zaragoza explained. “He told me to go back to Benidorm. Eight days later his wife appeared with the Minister of Governance and his wife. They reconfirmed my appointment as mayor, gave me an insignia to wear on my jacket so that 1 could enter El Pardo (Franco’s Madrid palace) whenever I wanted and stayed for four or five days.
“After that, Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo, would come in the spring or the autumn. She would stay eight days, or fifteen days, in my house,” he said. The Caudillo, or at least his wife, became Benidorm’s leading patron.
The archbishop got the message. The excommunication process was dropped. The bikini stayed. Some see this, at least symbolically, as a defining moment in recent Spanish history. It marked the beginning of a timid sexual revolution and helped to take the Catholicism out of national Catholicism. The tourists, more importantly, had the power to outface the Church. They brought not just money, but the seeds of change. They also brought the fresh air of democracy. There was no turning back.
Franco was there at the key moment. Without the bikini, quite possibly, there would have been no modern Benidorm and, in fact, precious little tourism at all. At this stage, had Spain not welcomed it, the nascent package tourism could easily have put its roots down elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
Bikinis would eventually make it past cinema censors in 1964. By 1979, with Franco less than four years in the grave, Spain’s beaches — and Spanish women — had gone topless. Today even some municipal swimming pools have nudist zones.
Franco, Zaragoza claimed, understood tourism. He would grill him on his ideas, give him the go-ahead, and then send him packing back to Benidorm. Franco later made him the country’s Director-General of Tourism. He also went to be a deputy at Franco’s rubber-stamp version of parliament.
Franco’s decision to back Zaragoza and his bikinis came at a time when he was under increasing pressure to ease the iron grip of both Church and State. That pressure would see some relatively liberal advances, including a relaxing of censorship, during the 1960s — though Franco would later regret much of the latter. We do not know whether he ever regretted letting the bikini loose.
Years later the revolution that started in Benidorm was still inspiring ecclesiastical tub-thumping. Father Aparicio Pellín put it this way in his 1970 tome The Problems of Youth: “Oh! If they erected a black cross on the beach for every mortal sin committed there, the beach would have more crosses than grains of sand!” Spain is a tourism superpower. Some of the credit for that has to go to the old dictator. The same families who turned small plots of beachside farming land into hotels in Majorca, the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol are now building or running resorts from Cuba and Santo Domingo to Jamaica, Bulgaria and Tunisia. In 1950, still in his twenties, Zaragoza began to draw broad boulevards on the map where only olive and almond trees stood. Benidorm, like much of this coast from Valencia south, had no running, domestic water supply. Drinking water was sold by a man with a mule that dragged a huge cask on wheels. Water wheels were still being used to move water in the fields. Waste was carried out of people’s houses in buckets and tipped into the sea or on to the earth.
Zaragoza claims the transformation of Benidorm, which followed six years of intense planning, was achieved by consensus. One of his first tasks was to devise a civic shield for the town. Many people thought he was mad. But he piped water in from 15 km away. He got boulevards approved and, most importantly, decided that, when it came to fresh building, height would be no block. The matchstick high-rise was born.
This may have been more by accident than design. Zaragoza’s dream was of a middle-class garden city with small tourist hotels. In 1950, however, a man called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London’s Fleet Street that he named Horizon. It took a group of British tourists to Calvi in Corsica in an airliner that was geare especially for the passengers. The package tour was born.
Second World War Dakotas, lying around unused, were soon pressed into service. By 1953 he was flying people to Spain and took 1,700 of the new “package tourists” abroad.
Benidorm’s defenders, and there are architects among them, say this embracing of the high-rise is the key to its success. It was inspired by the same movement that was replacing the bombed-out streets in London, Paris and Berlin with high-rise blocks of flats. It has the advantage of packing a lot of people close to the beach.
And that, after all, is what Benidorm is about. Its high-rises are so many tourist canisters, filled up, flushed out and filled up again, week in, week out. It is an efficient system.
Zaragoza’s dream of a pan-European, middle-class holidaying Utopia does not quite live up to closer inspection. For Benidorm is, for British tourists at least, a great, and mostly working-class — or lower middle-class — institution. This is Blackpool, or Skegness, on the Med. It is a nice, warm, familiar, safe place, full of pies and chips, British cooked breakfasts, English drinking holes, Sky television and the sort of entertainment once provided by working-men’s clubs. With time, paella and sangría have stopped being exotic. They have simply joined the list of British holiday staples. I tried walking down Levante beach asking British people why they were there. “Because I’ve been coming for 17 years,” was one reply. “The comedians in the clubs are great,” was another, referring to the British stand-ups who work the summer season. And, what is more, they truly loved it.
Foreign visitors might be surprised to know, however, that this is also a big resort for Spaniards, with a large community of “expat” Basques and a large number of second homes for those from Madrid. It also has a reputation, among Spanish pensioners, for being the best place in Spain for picking up members of the opposite sex.
No one is forced to come to Benidorm, yet 5 million visitors do every year. When Spaniards think that someone has spotted an opportunity and made the most of it they say he is “ni tonto, ni perezoso” — “neither stupid, nor lazy”. Perhaps that should go as a motto on Benidorm’s fake shield.
Extracts from Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett (Faber £16.99)
The book is available from: www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst or 0870 1608080 for £15.30
SEA, SUN AND SANGRIA
1950
2,700 residents, little tourism
2005
64,000 residents 4.5 million visitors a year
38,000 hotel rooms
330 skyscrapers: in Europe only London, Frankfurt and Moscow have more
600 bars
24 square miles of beach
