Costa del Sol, sun fun, crime and concrete

For 20 kilometres or so east of Gibraltar there are still a few patches of green in between the villages, but by the time you reach Estapona 'urbanizacións' sprawl along the coast forming a ribbon of concrete. With a few breaks here and there, mostly covered in plasticulture, Costa Concrete continues unabated for hundreds of kilometres. For the most part it is a dispiriting sight. The AP7 motorway snakes through the coastal hills a few miles inland; viewed from above, with the broad sweep of the blue sea in the foreground, the scenery remains magnificent in scale, even if somewhat tawdry close up.

We stopped for lunch in a service area, the mountains tops beyond Malaga were dusted with the first snow of winter. With the white city curving around the bay, a crystal light and yellowing trees, despite our best efforts, humanity has not quite sullied all the earth's beautiful places, I mused.

We are giving it a good try though. By chance as we pulled into the car park and became embroiled in a major police operation. Most of the area was cordoned-off. A dozen or so heavily armed officers surrounded two cars; the occupants skulked nearby under the watchful eye of a couple of Alsatians. Parked randomly around them were two snazzily liveried squad cars, an armoured van, and a posse of police motorbikes, their helmeted owners in white leathers cosplaying Star Wars stormtroopers. It was all very exciting. We trundled through the tableau and parked near the petrol station well away from the action, set the table and unpacked our bread and cheese. A true Brit 'Keep Calm and Carry On' moment.  A drugs raid perhaps? I suppose the area was dubbed Costa del Crime for a reason.

As we neared the outskirts of Malaga I pondered about the endless the roadside development. It consisted predominantly of  raw concrete constructed over the last half century. Take away the tat and you conclude that in 1960 most of Spain''s Mediterranean coast must have been sparsely populated away from the major cities. 

I asked myself what had been the biggest change I have seen in my lifetime? My initial response was to cite the explosion in communication technology. As a kid my family had an ancient 1930s radiogram, a clutch of '78s', if you wanted to listen to the Home Service you had to switch the radio on a couple of minutes before the programme started so the contraption's valves heated up. We had no car, TV or telephone. It is impossible to deny given the explosion during our generation's lifetime of mass media, car ownership, budget air travel, the Internet and the global reach of social media, that humanity is now interconnected in a way that would be unimaginable back then, other than in Dan Dare style Sci-Fi comic. 

However, as we drove through the concrete sprawl of 'Greater Mediterraneanea' I wondered if the technological revolution actually rested on a more fundamental shift in the human population. Global interconnection and global urbanisation happened simultaneously, but what was the relationship between the two? Could one have happened without the other? 

Later on I tracked down the stats. In the mid-fifties when I was born it is estimated that 30% of the world's population lived in urban areas. Today that figure is around 55%. However the percentage increase belies the magnitude of the change, because over my lifetime the world's population has risen from 2.8 billion to 7.46 billion. Urbanisation has increased even faster. In 1955 there were 864 million city dwellers on the planet, last year it is estimated that it had risen to 4.33 billion, an increase of 474%. Drive northwest from Malaga to Valencia and the sprawling development tells a small part of that story.

 

We were heading for Camping Laguna at Torre del Mar. The place itself is typifies the development boom in Spain which occurred in the latter half of the 20th century - a grid of apartments four blocks deep stretching for miles along the sea front. It was only when we tried to navigate around the place that the extent to which the building boom was wholly haphazard and unplanned becomes obvious. Some plots had been developed, others were still wasteland. The grid of roads had not quite been connected up. Cycling from the campsite to the local supermarket - which you could see in the distance - was like trying to solve one of those mazes you get in a puzzle book. Not that the place is horrible, a lot of effort has been put into landscaping the promenade. There is a great cycleway at the back of the beach. Nevertheless you sense that it is all the result of chaotic development driven by making a fast buck from the boom in package holidays in the 70s and 80s.

Why does this matter? Because what back then was a parochial debate between developers and environmentalists has taken on global significance. This week, ss the G20 economic summit ends in Argentina the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference opens in Poland. In the south of Spain lies an 800km strip of 'concrete evidence' stretching from Malaga to Valencia that in the past economic development triumphed over the conservation of resources. With Trump and Xi heading up the worlds biggest polluters I don't see this changing. It's all somewhat demoralising.

In fact where we are is a bit demoralising generally. Camping Laguna is packed with long stay wrinklies. They are volubly friendly towards each other but somewhat frosty towards itinerant newbies. The pitches themselves are small, we are packed together like battery chickens. The only positive aspect are the facilities, which are good. We are planning to move on tomorrow.

It's undoubtedly a truism to assert that travel broadens the mind, equally it can reinforce your prejudices. However wandering about for months on end as we do does confront us with questions constantly. There is a reason why I jumped to the conclusion that the revolution in communication technology was the biggest change in my lifetime. It was because I reside in the UK. It was only when I began to look at global population growth that I realised how little our island has been affected by the global rise in population. Over the past six decades the UK population has risen from 51 million to 64 million, an increase of about a third. During the same period the world population has almost tripled. If the population of Britain had increased at the world's average rate, there would now be 135 million of us squeezed onto our small island 

Our experience of urbanisation has been different too. By the 1950s Britain was already a predominantly urban due to the fact we industrialised during the 19th century. This is atypical, even in Europe; in France and Spain the mass movement from countryside to city happened much later in the middle part of last century. You can learn all this from a book or Wikipedia, but it has far more impact when you read it in the landscape as you travel along.