Ghosts of Spain (16 page)

The mechanism may have worked, but it was hardly fair. ‘
Cancelling
out the past was justified as a way of achieving
reconciliation
. The division born during the Civil War and boosted during the terrible post-war period had to be overcome. Proof that it had not been overcome, and remained latent, was that one side – that of the losers – was forced to forget as a condition for taking part in the new game,' says Morán.

Most Spaniards now believe democracy was somehow inevitable. Spain had become much wealthier. Its traditional class structure was broken down by the move from the countryside to the city. An urban middle class was in place by the time Franco died, ready to demand democracy and make it work.

Franco's legacy has not fully disappeared, though.

One of the things that helped prepare Spain for democracy was tourism. This took off, and then boomed, under Franco. It made an indelible mark on the country that persists today. The
pink-skinned
tourists brought with them not just money but the mores and attitudes of democratic northern Europe. The wind of change that blew south with the first package tourists was
symbolised
by something that, when first seen on a Spanish beach, shocked and delighted people in equal proportions – the bikini. To find out just how those two little pieces of cloth had changed Spain, and how the hordes who arrive every summer continue to do so, I would have to head for the beach. The Spanish costas, in all their terrible, garish glory, awaited.

The route along the lower half of Spain’s eastern coast has been travelled many times by invaders and colonisers. They have come south from Europe, north from Africa or, in pirate or
trading
ships, over the Mediterranean horizon. The place names along the coastline that stretches north from the semi-desert of Almería at Cabo de Gata provide constant reminders: from the Carthaginian Qart Hadast, now Cartagena; to the Romans’ Valentia and Dianium, now Valencia and Denia; and, in far greater number, to Moorish settlements with names like Alicante (Al-akant) and Alcoy or Benicassim and Beniali.

Driving north from Almería I am reminded, once more, that this is Spain’s driest, dustiest corner. Every time I come here, I am shocked by the harsh, unforgiving nature of the landscape. Even Old Castile, with its parched, yellowed plains, has nothing on it. Water is the local gold, fought over by neighbours, villages and towns. The politicians in Madrid invent, and then scrap, pharaonic systems for diverting the rivers of northern Spain down to this parched corner of the country. Ancient irrigation systems, Roman or Moorish in origin, allow the soil to perform the miracle of growing things. The plants traditionally grown here give an idea of the almost biblical nature of the place. There are acid-sweet loquats, almonds, carobs (which supposedly kept St John the Baptist alive in the wilderness) and, inland at Elche, ancient plantations of date palms that transport you straight to the Arabian desert. The mountains here are all rock. They rear up in great, glinting shards or loom, hazy, grey and menacing, in the distant, pulsating heat.

It all sounds very uninviting. Nineteenth-century travellers were advised to skip this part of Spain. But one adventurous
British lady, Mrs Ramsay, came up this coast by train in 1874 and sternly ticked off fellow travellers for choosing ‘to pass this lovely country by night’. She found, at least to the north of Valencia, that ‘the railway passes close to the sea, which stretches its calm blue expanse away to the horizon; not a sail breaks the loneliness; the ripple washes lazily into sheltered sandy coves; the rocks are
covered
with heath,
palmitos
(dwarf palm trees), thyme, and all kinds of aromatic herbs; and the stately pines give a peculiar repose to the landscape.’ Certainly, the arid climate did not stop this coast attracting the attention of the great Mediterranean cultures. Four centuries before Christ it produced La Dama de Elche, the most spectacular sculpture of the Iberian, pre-Roman culture. The
elegant
Dama wears what look like elaborately carved cart-wheels over her ears and boasts what must have been the best lips in antiquity.

This is also one of the far-flung outposts of flamenco, where it was sung in local mines. So, I thought, it was still appropriate to have the full, fibrous voice of singer Camarón de la Isla filling the car with, alternately, his pain or
alegría
as I turned north after a long road trip east from Seville. With Camarón keeping me
company
, the dusty landscape slid quickly past. A few hours later, I was a quarter of the way up the coast, passing Alicante.

A few miles north from Alicante a thin, mysterious, pole-like structure began to emerge over some distant hills. As the
kilometres
ticked by, it remained virtually unchanged in size. I realised that I must be looking at something a long way off in the distance. Eventually, the pole began to thicken and, cresting one of the hills along this bumpy coastline, I finally realised I was reaching what the Moors called Beni-Darhim (the son, or followers, of Darhim). The gradually broadening shape ahead of me was Spain’s tallest building, the Gran Hotel Bali. It stood like a proud, raised finger on the edge of a place whose current name is not only easily recognised, but has become a modern legend of its own – for this, finally, was Benidorm.

If anywhere in Spain symbolises the country’s latest invasion, this is it. A fresh invading horde, sun-hat and sandal-wearing
northern European tourists, has rampaged its way along this coast over the past forty years. The horde has made Benidorm its capital. This time there has been no resistance. The burghers of Benidorm have rolled out a welcome carpet of concrete,
tarmacadam
and brick. Jointly they have vandalised what was once one of the most beautiful spots on the Spanish coast.

Even those of us who are instinctively appalled by Benidorm, however, cannot help but be awe-struck by what has happened here. For locals it is a genuine miracle. The closest thing I have to a Spanish family, one side of my partner’s maternal family, comes from Tárbena, a village of six hundred people stuck high up in the mountains above Benidorm. The genetic codes of the peoples who surged backwards and forwards across La Marina – as this part was known until a tourism marketing department renamed it the Costa Blanca, the White Coast – are imprinted somewhere in that of my own children.

Tárbena was once a Moorish village whose inhabitants, given no other option except exile from their home of six hundred years, became
moriscos
– nominally Christian converts – after the
Reconquista
. Even that, however, did not save them. In 1609, Felipe III ordered the
moriscos
out of Spain. Today’s Tarbeneros are descendants of the seventeen families imported from the island of Majorca to replace them. They still make the same, soft,
paprika-flavoured
sobrasada
sausages of the Majorcans and speak a peculiar dialect of Catalan, which is mainly Valencian, but is still coloured by words of Majorcan.

My children’s great-grandfather, Salvador Ripoll Moncho, was one of many emigrants who left this stretch of the Mediterranean in 1916. He headed to the Americas, building a life for himself in New York and then in his wife’s country, Panama. He returned to live out his retirement and, finally, die here in La Marina.

He was buried in the cemetery at Tárbena, alongside his brothers and sisters and the generations of Ripolls and Monchos who had eked out a living from the almonds, the oranges, the lemon trees and the loquats of these austere and desiccated hills. It was from this graveyard, during a night-time stroll, that I first
set eyes on Benidorm. This was the early 1990s so the Hotel Bali was still just a hole in the ground. But, there below me in the distance, I could make out the glistening, glaring lights of what one Spanish writer refers to as ‘the great touropolis’. Its sudden appearance seemed to me to make a dramatic and violent
intrusion
on Tárbena’s otherwise undisturbed, mountain-top calm.

Few in Tárbena would have agreed with me. For Salvador Ripoll Moncho’s relatives who still live there, and for those who moved down the hill and into the bright lights, Benidorm is a modern marvel.

There is no better symbol of that Benidorm miracle, with all its glaring faults, than the Hotel Bali. Fifty-two floors, 186 metres high, the Bali is at its most spectacular at night, and from a
distance
. Then it looks like a massive, silver knife, projecting beams of light up into the clouds. By day, close up, it is a dull, grey, concrete and glass giant. ‘We kept waiting for them to paint it,’ quipped a drinker at one of the Union flag-bedecked, Sky TV and all-day-British-breakfast bars – with names like the Pheasant Plucker, the Jolly Sailor and The Bridewell – that surround it, when I visited.

The building of the Bali was an epic affair. It was put up
gradually
over fourteen years by a group of local hotel owners who poured their annual profits into it. No loans were taken. The Bali was built on the back of a boom. On good years it rose steadily upwards. On excellent ones it went still faster. That alone made it, by the standards of the construction industry, one of the strangest buildings to have gone up in Europe in recent decades. It is an accurate symbol of modern Benidorm. The Bali is ambitious but pragmatic, big but boring, great but gruesome. It is, in short, what it, and Benidorm, was designed to be – a vast container for
package
tourism. And Benidorm is to package tourism what Las Vegas is to gambling – the undisputed capital of the world.

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. A typhoon that blew through this plantation of cement poles might, one imagines, leave it looking like a forest after a violent storm, the buildings uprooted and lying on the floor in a jumble, like so many spillikins or jackstraws.

It is also, however, the high-rise capital of southern Europe. Neither Paris, nor Milan, Rome, Athens, Barcelona or Madrid can compete with its 330 high-rises. No wonder locals have dubbed it, in deference to New York, BeniYork. In Europe as a whole it is out-skyscraped only by Frankfurt, Moscow and Greater London. Paris and London are the only places in Europe with more hotel rooms than Benidorm, which has some 38,000. If Spain is a global superpower in tourism – and it is – then Benidorm is the towering symbol of that status.

Staying in the Bali the night after it had opened, I found myself riding up and down its glass exterior lift, drawn to the nosy-parker view of the front rooms of apartments in a dozen other
skyscrapers
. The lifts here are, on their own, a reminder that modern Benidorm exists for, and because of, foreigners. ‘Stand away from the doors when closing,’ the lift ordered me, in an English voice which, in my memory at least, had a light Manchester accent. ‘
Las puertas están cerrando
,’ it repeated – the Spanish vowels mashed flat by the very same English voice. A designer who pitched to work on the lay-out of bedrooms told me he was asked to think of ‘an English butcher’s wife’ when coming up with ideas.

Fifty years ago, this was a modest beach-side village, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees. My children’s grandmother first came here, on the way to visit her father’s village, in the 1950s. She found a three-mile-long, double crescent of almost virgin golden sand and rolling dunes. In those days, the village sat on and around a rocky outcrop that divided the two beaches, Poniente and Levante. Small fishing boats, the
tarrafes
, hung with four large lanterns each to attract fish at night, bobbed in the water or lay drawn-up on the sand. The men often spent months away from home, as sailors, officers or captains on coastal steamers and transatlantic ships or working the
almadraba
, the complicated
maze of nets laid out to trap tuna fish. The system of diverting the fish into a small killing zone, the ‘
cop
’, where they could be killed with iron hooks and harpoons, was perfected under the Moors. Archaeological evidence was once found here of pre-Roman jars for storing the valuable oil in which tuna was conserved. The Iberian settlement where the jars were found has now, inevitably, been buried under concrete. Benidorm, like Spain, would rather look forwards than back. A few archaeological remains were hardly going to survive the gold-rush fever of tourism.

The
almadraba
was a massive, complex task, a piece of maritime engineering with more than 1,000 kilometres of rope, netting and cables, fixed by hundreds of anchors, rings and gates, used to create a single maze covering some six square kilometres of sea. The men of Benidorm were
almadraba
experts. They would be called for from as far away as Tunisia and Sicily to lay the nets as the fish migrated south in the early summer and returned north in the autumn. The women, meanwhile, tended the olives, the almonds, the lemons, oranges and carobs.

Benidorm attracted relatively few visitors. In 1950 there were four or five small
fondas
,
pensiones
and hotels for the odd
commercial
traveller or for families from Madrid or Barcelona who came to spend the summer. A handful of holiday villas belonged to wealthy families from Valencia, Alcoy and Madrid.

‘We didn’t call it “
turismo
” back then, we called it “
veraneo
”, summering. We got the word “tourism” later, from the Swiss,’ the man who was mayor in the 1950s, Pedro Zaragoza Orts, told me when I visited him on his eighty-first birthday in Benidorm.

Zaragoza is the father of modern Benidorm. When I met him, this largely unreconstructed Francoist was still fighting fit and a passionate defender of what had happened to his village. To find him, I had needed to negotiate my way through the town centre’s bustling, overcrowded streets, following a man dressed in a
flowing
, spangled blue cape and glittery top hat. The man was steering a perilous-looking vehicle from a driver’s seat perched on top of a ladder some fifteen feet above the wheels. A loudspeaker blasted music and publicity for a nearby water park.

Zaragoza’s office was tucked at the back of a nondescript,
modern
arcade, in the small, chaotic town centre. ‘I was born here,’ he said, pointing to one corner of the office. ‘My mother died there ten days afterwards,’ he added, indicating another corner. He was pointing to places that, like most of old Benidorm, no longer existed. His old home had been knocked down long ago to build this drab, functional block and, one assumes, make some money for his family.

Zaragoza’s 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.

What Zaragoza has never been, however, is conservative. He is proud of the Moorish and Jewish blood that, he believes, must run somewhere in his veins. 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 became a leper in society.’