Ghosts of Spain (17 page)

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 which already considered beaches a moral
danger
to the nation, they also wore the, then voluminous, two-piece swimsuits known as bikinis. 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 she put a shirt on.

Zaragoza’s friends in high places turned their backs on him when he took on the all-powerful Church. Two government
ministers
backed the excommunication campaign. So, one day, he got up at 4 a.m., 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 airplane, 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 I 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 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.

General Franco was there at the key moment. Without the bikini there, quite possibly, 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.

Zaragoza’s Vespa trips to El Pardo became regular events. ‘I would set off early, do things in Madrid in the afternoon and
come back that night. That way I only lost a few hours working time,’ he said.

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. Perhaps the generalísimo was conscious that Spain’s previous, though somewhat more benign, dictator – General Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of the Falange founder – had also done his bit for tourism by founding the state chain of Parador hotels, in converted monasteries and castles, in 1928.

‘But,
ojo
, watch out, I never once asked Franco for anything for myself or for my family,’ said Zaragoza. 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. He does not vote in Spain’s modern democracy. ‘The political parties are too exclusive. They have some good people, but they also have some complete
hijos de puta
, sons of bitches,’ he said. ‘I am male, from Benidorm, and a lawyer. Those are the things that define me. Not the political parties. The best politics in the world are summed up in the Ten Commandments. Love God and love thy neighbour as thyself.

‘People don’t know what Franco was like. He was more humane than people say. He was a good father, a Spaniard, a man with clear ideas who could understand any proposal. He was not a fanatic. He treated me very well and I was not easy because I am rebellious and I do not accept everything I am told. I want to know the truth, I am a fighter,’ said Zaragoza.

Zaragoza Orts must be one of the last people on earth to view Franco as a social liberal. ‘Franco was liberal. That does not mean he was a libertarian. Libertarianism is creating scandal, it is provocation and filth,’ he said.

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!’

In Benidorm, these days, things can occasionally go so far the other way that they get out of hand. I found this out the day Mercedes, who works in the news department of state
broadcaster
TVE, called me to say that an e-mail being circulated amongst her colleagues was provoking loud, uncontrollable outbursts of laughter. As it involved my
compatriotas
in Benidorm, perhaps I would like to see it?

And so I came into possession of a news article from
Levante
, a serious-minded local newspaper, the contents of which, I was sure, Zaragoza would disapprove. The article quoted from a report by the town’s police. At 3.30 a.m. on a hot August night, they had been called to investigate strange noises emerging from Levante beach, in what was referred to as the ‘
zona inglesa
’, ‘the English zone’. There they discovered a group of 200 people
cheering
on the activities of ‘a
señorita
and four men, three of whom were penetrating the
señorita’
. Sexual squeamishness not being a Spanish thing, both the police report and the newspaper explained in precise detail how this feat was being achieved. Ages, names and nationalities were dutifully recorded. The fifth member of the group, I was informed, was filming the others while ‘waiting his turn to enter into action’.

The police report identified the woman and one man as British, while the others were Swiss and French. They were persuaded to stop what they were doing. No one in the crowd, however, would admit that they had had their
sensibilidad herida
, sensibilities hurt, or would bring charges. Uncertain what to do, the local police patrol bundled the five into their wagons and took them back to the station. The incident, however, was far from over. When the wagon doors were opened, the
señorita
and the cameraman were found to have recommenced the activities interrupted on the beach. They were reaching the peak of their excitement, thereby,
in the official words of the police report, ‘bringing to an end their brilliant performance’.

Spain is a tourism superpower. It attracts 53 million foreign
visitors
a year (16 million of them British and 2.3 million of them Dutch). One in twenty come to Benidorm or the rest of the Costa Blanca. More than 11 per cent of Spain’s economy runs off tourism. 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 or 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 an ancient agricultural watering system inherited from the Moors. But it 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 onto the earth. ‘We asked ourselves what we had. The answer was not agriculture. It was too dry here. But we had the climate, we had our own, liberal temperament – the result of years of sailing the oceans – and we had the sand on the beach,’ he explained. ‘It had to be tourism.’ Little Benidorm – as
neighbouring
towns like Alcudia or Denia with Greek or Roman pasts like to remind them – did not even have any significant history to sell. One of Zaragoza’s first jobs, indeed, was to invent a town shield. Then he got on with the task of inventing what is, in effect, a new town.

Zaragoza claims the transformation of Benidorm, which
followed
six years of intense planning, was achieved by consensus. He likes to point to the fact that his original fantasy boulevards, eighty metres wide, were eventually halved in size. These
boulevards
swept imperiously through small plots of land carefully handed down from generation to generation over centuries. Many people thought he was mad. But he piped water in from
fifteen kilometres away in Polop – though that took until 1960 and needed a group of fifty-seven villagers to pledge to pay for the loan needed to buy a distant estate with a good well. He got the imaginary boulevards approved and, most importantly, decided that, when it came to fresh building, height would be no block. A piece of land could get planning permission on the basis of
volume
, of so many cubic metres of building per square metres of land. Zaragoza picked up a book to explain. ‘The building volume could be used like this,’ he said, laying the book flat. ‘Or it could be used like this, or this,’ he said, placing the book first on its spine and then, holding it upright, as if sitting on a bookshelf. ‘And if they did it that last way, there was space for gardens, for
swimming
pools, for tennis courts, or for car parking,’ he said. The match-stick high-rise was born.

In fact, 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 on London’s Fleet Street which he named Horizon. It took a group of British tourists to Calvi in Corsica in an airliner which, for the first time, was fleeted
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. ‘I am pleased by what I have achieved,’ he said in 1993, by which time 12 million British people were flying abroad every year. ‘But I am upset by what has
happened
in some destinations.’

Benidorm’s defenders, and there are architects amongst 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 may seem crowded a hundred metres up, but, by the
standards
of the rest of the Spanish
costas
, it is light and airy on the ground. It also has the advantage, for a tourist resort, 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.

It may be a massive eyesore, but spread those tourists out
horizontally
– the way they have done in Marbella or, further down the coast from Benidorm, in Torrevieja and numerous other spots – and they go on for ever. If Benidorm, with its twenty-four square miles and 12.3 kilometres of coastline really does account for 5 per cent of foreign holidaymakers (38,000 hotel rooms of some 700,000) in Spain, then, in theory, the rest could be plonked on an island the size of, say, Ibiza. Alternatively, more of them could still be shovelled into little Benidorm – where building land is by no means all used up.

Benidorm’s beach is still beautiful. But now you have to hire a top-floor suite at the Bali if you want to appreciate just how majestic those twin curves of gold are. Most visitors are left to glimpse it through a thicket of buildings. The beach is cleaned every night by machines which churn up and filter the sand. This system is now used all over Spain. A recent newspaper report tells how a woman who fell asleep on a beach was swallowed up by one of the machines. A sign in one, older, beachside hotel
overshadowed
by the Bali, reminded me that Benidorm’s reputation for the cheap and shoddy would never quite go. ‘Clients are reminded that reception has a special thinner available to help you remove grease or tar from your feet,’ it read.

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 sangria 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 seventeen years,’
was one reply. ‘The comedians in the clubs are great,’ was another, referring to the British stand-ups who come here to work the summer season. And, what is more, they truly loved it. In the mid-1990s the town hall managed to find a British couple who had visited seventy-two times. I have never seen it, but I feel sure that somebody, somewhere is selling long, gooey, pink sticks of Benidorm Rock.