The Unexpected Destination on My Doorstep: Looking Down on Benidorm by Matthew Clapham.
Twenty-odd years ago, I journeyed across Spain in the footsteps of Laurie Lee to write a travel book. A couple of agents looked at it, but ‘Walking the Lion’ went nowhere, my boot leather worn out in vain.
“Never mind,” I told myself, with youthful enthusiasm, “I’ll have another go soon.”
I moved to Spain for good, but before that second attempt was ever written, I had kids and a mortgage, and heading off for a few months of literary backpacking was out of the question. The foothills of the Pyrenees were now home, so maybe I could at least manage a book about Andorra, a country small enough to traverse in a week.
Sorry tales gone wrong
That project didn’t get off the ground either, and we ended up moving to the Costa Blanca, as family and work commitments complicated and multiplied. Even a week’s solo writing trip now seemed impossible. The itch remained unscratched, but now I would have to make do with a destination that could be reconnoitred from home as an occasional pastime.
There was just one problem. That destination was Benidorm, the only town of any note for miles around.
And who would want to read about Benidorm, the carbuncle of the Costa, home to nothing but brutalist skyscrapers and beer-swilling stag parties? The town surely had nothing to tell but the sorry tale of tourism gone wrong, a Mediterranean fishing village long since blighted by over-development, transformed into a loutish concrete theme park. Right?
It was an assumption I had never thought to question before moving to the area. An assumption shared with millions of North Europeans – and plenty of Spaniards – who see the resort as nothing more than the tatty punchline of a tired joke, a place of sunburnt flesh, sagging bellies and all-day fry-ups washed down by far too many pints. The very last setting imaginable for a Spanish travel book aiming to scratch beneath the surface of the country’s culture and history.
Being wrong about Benidorm
I was wrong, as it turned out. And as with all journeys of redemption, the first step on that path was to acknowledge my mistake and the need to change my attitude. I had fallen into the trap laid by decades of two-dimensional media stereotyping of just one facet of Benidorm’s reality.
Dig further into the newspaper archives, right back to the early days of tourism in the 1960s, and Benidorm was a charmingly picturesque destination, attracting holidaymakers eager to make use of the newly launched airline routes to Valencia and Alicante. A few years before that, and poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had chosen the town for their honeymoon writing retreat, as a tranquil reprieve from the dazzling lights and throbbing music of Alicante itself.
That was where the story of Benidorm’s tourism had begun, I discovered. So how had it gone astray?
Again, I was asking the wrong question, from the wrong perspective. The more I researched Benidorm’s initial plans and their subsequent development, the more I realised that its high-rise model was in fact in many ways the right way to approach tourism, or at least, a very necessary way, if everyone in northern Europe and inland Spain was to get the week or two of summertime seafront sunshine they expected.
Affordable tourism
What Benidorm’s administrators realised from the start was that a conventionally elegant design of spacious villas with private gardens was not the model of the future. The new tourism era which began in the Baby Boom years would bring in far more people of more modest means. Hopping on a flight to a foreign beach was no longer the preserve of the moneyed gentry, but was becoming feasible for a much broader level of the socioeconomic pyramid.
Benidorm made sure from the outset it offered them affordable capacity within its tiny municipality. High-rise accommodation, communal pools and gardens, sea views and a Mediterranean breeze for all. The same vision as such architectural pioneers as Le Corbusier. The same layout as the 15-minute city championed by today’s urban planners.
Ugly by some aesthetic standards – although Benidorm’s own residents are rather proud of their dramatically Manhattanesque skyline – until you consider the alternative.
What if Benidorm’s skyscrapers didn’t exist? Where would those three million holidaymakers a year stay? How much of Spain’s coastline would have been sacrificed to sprawling holiday home developments and faux authentic low-rise Mediterranean boutique hotels? What would have happened to the Sierra Helada nature reserve that still makes up half of Benidorm’s municipal coastline?
Benidorm: a story worth telling
Benidorm designed itself as a ‘leisure factory’. The term sounds off-putting, even dystopian. But someone had to do it, and make it work. Looking at the town from that perspective, the role it fulfils in Spain, in the tourism sector and in the global economy, it began to make perfect sense.
Neon-lit and brassy, Benidorm reinvented itself as not only Spain’s Manhattan, but its Miami Beach and Las Vegas. Quite an achievement in the space of a few decades for what was in the early Fifties an impoverished fishing village of barely 2,000 malnourished souls. It saw a very different future for itself, and I am glad to have discovered a very different present here.
A story which turned out to be very much worth telling.
About Looking Down on Benidorm:
Javier Bardem doing karaoke in his undies? A conundrum that could only be answered by a city as unique and unexpected as Benidorm.
But what is Benidorm? How did its present form come about, with its distinctive architecture and economy, and its larger – and lairier – than life reputation?
Rising from its tranquil bay like a misplaced Manhattan, it has been challenging preconceived notions ever since Mayor Pedro Zaragoza Orts drew up plans to revive his poverty-stricken fishing village back in the 1950s.
So is the Mediterranean’s most successful holiday resort a vision of heaven or hell?
Think you know Benidorm? Think again.
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