Benidorm - the new Rhondda.

17th November

Central casting placed a mobility scooter next to the sign....

Benidorm is one of those places that despite being a perfectly respectable proper noun has had adjectival responsibilities thrust upon it. So if you wish to cast aspersions on any holiday destination in the world all you need to say is, "Well it's all a bit Benidorm". Immediately people will think - cheap booze, fat Brits, wall to wall concrete, drunk, obnoxious Geordies. Of course most of the people being snooty about the place won't actually have ever been there, but that is of no consequence, for the place has done its adjectival job, whatever the actuality of the proper noun.

So, in order to discover if a terrible injustice has been done, and in reality Benidorm is the pearl of the Costa Blanca, we had to go.

Now reporting back I can honestly say  - think cheap booze, fat Brits, wall to wall high rise. I did not actually witness personally any piss-heads from Byker, but given that there was a bar called 'The Geordie' another named 'Gallowgate', that lager was €1 per pint, Mojitos €3 per litre, you don't need to be a genius to work out what is going to happen when Berb and his marras, or Linda and her hen party from Sunderland hit Playa de Levante.

then they moved it to outside the Fish & Chip Shop

The blokes on the right and the girls on the right are all actors from central casting and the posters advertising cheap booze and sign promoting a 'sexy show' at 5pm. were produced by the props dept.

but the beautriful 1960s hotel with palm trees at the front is real...

However, now having been, the fact that Benidorm does live up to its tabloid image is the least interesting thing about it. It is what it is. How it became so - the larger events in the second part of last century which shaped its development - that's what is really fascinating.

Just to digress a moment. One of the things I looked at when researching my dissertation was the growth of industrial cities. In the century from 1800 the world's population more or less doubled. In 1800 the biggest cities in the world were London, Paris, Beijing and Tokyo. The latter two doubled in size, in line with the growth of the world's population generally. London and Paris however more than quadrupled in size. Even more spectacularly,  Manchester grew by 700% and New York by 3000%. The process of industrialisation led to population growth far in excess of the norm.

Take one look at Benidorm and you can see most of the high rise development must have been built in a fifteen year period from the mid-sixties onwards. In other words the place exploded in size like an industrialising city. The reason is simple, Benidorm is an industrial city turning out mass produced holidays like Walsall produced widgets or Tunstall teapots. We don't expect those places to be picturesque or to be putting a bid in to be the next European city of culture, so we should not expect Benidorm to look winsome either.

Once you perceive Benidorm's industrial nature then its greatness begins to dawn on you. Of course it's different to the manufacturing cities of the nineteenth century because it developed a century later, and different forces shaped it. If anything it developed even faster than its manufacturing predecessors.

In the late 1950s, newly married, the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath write of visiting the small fishing village of Benidorm. I do wonder if even back then it was in actuality, a village. Even so, poetic licence acknowledged, as you behold the wall of high rise that sweeps across the length of the sandy bay, six kilometres in length and six or seven blocks deep, the two poets' comments do bring home the swiftness of the resort's development in the 60s and 70s.

The magnificent bay looking east

and west....

It developed because of a positive leap forward in the fortunes of ordinary people that happened in the two decades after WWII. The combination of expanding economies, strong trade unions and progressively minded politicians meant that for the first time ordinary factory workers and office clerks had enough money in their back pocket, plus a guaranteed two weeks holiday and so were able to fly south and spend family time together having fun in the sun. With an huge, empty sandy bay, a nearby airport at Alicante and 300+ days of sunshine Benidorm's days as a sleepy seaside town were numbered. It became Northern Europe's premier destination for a Mediterranean summer holiday, clocking up over 10 million visits per year in 2009 according to the Lonely Planet guide.

It's not without charm, Benidorm is worth a (brief) visit.

This was important for Spain too. When dear old Ted and Sylvia dropped by in the late 50s they were holidaying in a twenty year old Fascist state. Spain was desperately poor, and desperate for foreign currency, For the Franco regime mass tourism seemed easy pickings so up went the high rise hotels with little regard for planning or visual appeal. The effect was to open Spain to the outside world. When it made a rapid transition to democracy on Franco's death in 1975 and was ready to join the EU less than a decade later, the role of Spain's Benidorms' should not be forgotten in this peaceful revolution.

We enjoyed our visit, and I would urge people to go see, if you have any interest in history, then the place offers a living vision of Western Europe's post war renewal and social revolution.

Oh, I almost forgot, why do I think it's like the Rhonnda Valley? Because Benidorm's riches result from mining a golden seam of sunshine in the same way the Welsh valleys mined black gold. Both had a totally devastating effect of their respective natural environments. The big difference of course is unlike coal, sunshine does not run out, and whereas the Rhondda is a ghost town, Benidorm thrives, throwing up even more concrete towers of dubious architectural merit with jolly abandon. 

Viva Espagna !