Naked at Lunch (13 page)

The kids surprised me. I hadn’t been expecting it and, honestly, I don’t know why. Although I guess it’s because if you were naked around kids in the United States you’d probably be arrested as a sex offender or something. But really, why wouldn’t you take your kids to a beach resort? It’s normal in Europe for families to go on naturist holidays together, and the hotel went out of its way to accommodate them with babysitting services and a range of activities for kids of all ages. The little ones do art projects, make excursions to the beach, or have specialty parties like “Cowboys and Indians” and something called a “princess party,” while the older kids can “catwalk around the pool” and “be a model for a day,” sing karaoke, and enjoy a “mini-disco.” The little kids and preteens seemed evenly split between wearing swimsuits and going nude, but the teenagers—hyper self-conscious—piled on as many clothes as they could.

I heard some shouting and turned to see the youth activity director waving a bunch of kids over to where she was standing. I’m guessing it was some kind of morning roll call before they went off to play. But why she decided to gather all of them a few feet from the chair where I was splayed out is something I do not know. In a matter of seconds my chaise was suddenly adjacent to a school yard, thirty or forty kids of all ages lining up to hear instructions from their teacher. I looked up from my book to see a huddle of teenage girls acting like they weren’t looking at me. I returned the favor, acting like I wasn’t looking at them acting like they weren’t looking at me. That way no one had to feel uncomfortable. For a second I considered covering my crotch with a book, but I was reading Jess Walter’s excellent novel
Beautiful Ruins
and, well, I may be getting older but it’s too soon to apply
that
label to my genitals. Besides, doing anything would’ve been an acknowledgment that I was feeling uncomfortable and my being uncomfortable might’ve made them uncomfortable, or at least think that they should be uncomfortable when, really, nobody has to be uneasy about any of it as long as we all act like we’re not looking.

After what to me seemed like an hour of lying naked on a playground, the kids got their orders and ran off to do various fun things, but before I could turn back to my reading I heard some strange sounds and looked over to see a group of men and women standing in a circle doing what I can only call organized rhythmic clapping. There wasn’t any music playing that I could hear, just a group of naked people in a circle clapping out a beat. Some kind of traditional sun worship warm-up? I had no idea what they were doing, but it reminded me of the horror film
The Wicker Man
and I was sufficiently unnerved that I required a beer from the bar.

Except for these occasional outbursts it was quiet. Birds in the trees chirped, the waterfall in the pool made a continuous aquatic rumble. Occasionally someone would dive in. This tranquillity would be broken from time to time by announcements over a loudspeaker. PA feedback would squeal, heralding another incomprehensible broadcast as the hotel tried to shove a good time down our throats. Or maybe it
was
fun. I know one of the announcements trumpeted the start of “flower power mojito hour” and an exuberant young man in a kind of hippie clown outfit came bounding out of the bar to round people up for a free shot of mint-tinged booze. As much as I enjoy a good mojito—and believe me when I say with all sincerity that the mojito is one of mankind’s greatest achievements—I couldn’t be bothered to get out of my lounge chair. Besides, the clown outfit scared me. Would we all take a shot of flower power mojito and then stand naked in a circle rhythmic clapping?

People lined up for the free mojito shots but then went back to their chairs for more sunbathing. A few of the wilder ones jumped into the pool. Which is to say that the pool area returned to normality, a totally normal resort normality. Couples played
pétanque
on small sand pits. People read books and applied sunscreen. A couple of younger women sat in their lounge chairs obsessively sending text messages. Kiddies splashed in the shallow end. No one used the water slide. A mother played Ping-Pong with her ten-year-old son—which in America would spell years of therapy for both parent and child, not because of the Ping-Pong but because of the nakedness of the Ping-Pong players; but here it seemed innocent, cute even. In other words, it could’ve been any resort hotel anywhere in the world, except at the Hotel Vera Playa Club everyone was naked.

Playa
means “beach” and
Vera Playa
is simply “beach in Vera.” But the beach has some history. It’s where Hannibal allegedly landed his elephants in his bid to defeat the Roman Empire in the Second Punic War, and more recently, in what was called the Palomares Incident of 1966, it’s just a few kilometers from where an American B-52 bomber carrying four H-bombs crashed after a midair collision with a refueling tanker. Although none of the bombs exploded, the soil was contaminated by plutonium dust, and the U.S. government spent billions of dollars digging up the Spanish dirt, shipping it home, and burying it in South Carolina.

The hotel was constructed on the ruins of an abandoned desalination plant, and roads originally built to truck freshwater out are now used to import the area’s newest economic driver: naked tourists.

I asked the Centro de Gestión y Promoción Turística del Ayuntamiento de Vera, the official tourism bureau of the city, for some statistics on tourism. Here’s a rough translation of its official report: “With respect to data recorded at that point we can state that during the year 2012 there were a total of 7,687 visits, of which 73.02 percent were made by domestic tourists, and the remaining 26.98 percent, by foreign tourists.”

For the number one industry in the area that doesn’t seem like a lot of people. But then the data is pulled from tourists visiting the information desk at the convent in downtown Vera, which was hosting an art show by local students when I stopped by. According to the tourist bureau’s data, only six Americans visited Vera in 2012. Which really surprised me. Even if you’re not into naturism, this is a strikingly beautiful part of Spain. But maybe Americans really are more prudish than Europeans.

I can’t imagine any of the naturists I’d seen at the beach bothering to go to the city center to look at an old convent. Not while the sun is shining and they can keep their clothes off. However, I do find the ratio of Spanish tourists to foreign tourists informative. Most of the guests at the Hotel Vera Playa Club were Spanish, with tourists from the United Kingdom outnumbering the second-largest group, Germans, 5 to 1. The rest were French or Italian with some glamorous Russians thrown in. I’m not kidding about the Russians. The men were handsome, the women were gorgeous, and they showed up for breakfast drinking Cava and wearing exquisite clothes. They were movie stars compared with the rest of us in our T-shirts and shorts. And, yes, you are required to wear clothes in the dining room at the hotel. But seeing the beautiful Russians was the first time in a nonsexual social nude setting when I thought that I couldn’t wait to see what they looked like naked. It was a juvenile impulse, I admit it, but the Russians did not disappoint.

I’m not surprised that the foreign tourists are from countries with miserable weather. Why wouldn’t they want to leave the cold and wet of northern Europe for the dry heat and blistering sun of southern Spain? It is semiarid desert and looks a bit like the iconic American Southwest, which explains why this part of Spain has been the backdrop for
Lawrence of Arabia
;
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
;
A Fistful of Dollars
;
and parts of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
,
among others
.

The beach at Vera Playa, which was designated naturist by the local government in 1979, is more than two kilometers of flat, pebbly sand. Of course now that I think about it, the Spanish authorities probably decided that an area with a history of radioactive contamination might as well be designated naturist.

In the 1980s the
urbanizaciónes
began being developed along the naturist beach. The first was called the Natsun—which I’m guessing is a portmanteau of “naturist” and “sunshine”—followed by others with names like Vera Natura, Natura World, Armony Natura, and Vera Luz. These are not super-swanky developments. They look like the condos you might find in small beach communities like Carpinteria and Encinitas on the California coast. Which is not to say they’re not nice. They look perfectly fine.

The best part about living in an
urbanización
is you can walk from your condo, along pedestrian pathways, to the beach and back without wearing any clothes. That you can stop at a grocery store or a bar or a restaurant without getting dressed just adds to the appeal. No shirt, no shoes, no pants, no nothing. Where you keep your wallet is a bit of a conundrum, and I hadn’t seen anyone wearing a fanny pack.

Unlike other nudist and naturist resorts, Vera Playa isn’t hidden behind walls or locked behind gates. The beach and the pathways are open to anyone who wants to drop trou and air his or her genitals. It’s an audacious concept. Creating a clothing-optional neighborhood? A place that’s open to the public? Why?

I should note that my use of the phrase “clothing optional” annoys naturists. For them, it’s either naturist or textile, with no in-between. Which is fine in theory, but in practice people seem to wear whatever makes them comfortable. On the beach and in the
urbanizaciónes
I saw as many people wearing swimsuits or shorts as people who were totally nude.

I contacted Bob Tarr, an ardent naturist, a civic-boosting resident of one of the
urbanizaciónes
, and the webmaster of the informative site
veraplaya.info
, and asked him who lived in these complexes. Tarr replied, “Most of the homes here (80% or so) are Spanish owned and with relatively few exceptions they are used for the July/August summer holidays and occasionally during the rest of the year mainly at bank holiday periods.” Bob’s numbers seem to correspond with the data from the tourist bureau, so maybe using the convent information booth as a metric wasn’t such a strange idea after all. Bob wasn’t going to be in Vera Playa when I was; he said it was “a bit too hot and a lot too busy” that time of year. Which surprised me because it was early July, the weather was pleasant, and it wasn’t particularly crowded.

With almost 80 percent of the owners not around all year, who rents the apartments in the
urbanizaciónes
? Bob told me that occasionally non-naturists will take advantage of the relatively low rents on these vacation homes, and that has become, as he said, “a bit of a thorny issue.”

I wanted to get an idea of how the locals felt about this mix of “textile” and “naturist,” so I arranged an interview with José Carmelo Jorge Blanco, the mayor of Vera. If anyone would know about thorny issues or how the locals felt about their beaches being overrun by naked people, he would.

The center of Vera is eight kilometers from Vera Playa. I left the hotel and drove around, basically getting lost, until a friendly bicyclist pointed me in the right direction and I found myself in Vera. After I wound my way through tiny one-way streets near the city center—my rented Fiat proving to be excellent at maneuvering through the narrow alleys—I turned up in the Plaza Mayor at the tourism office, where a woman named Pilar Guerra was waiting for me. Pilar is tall and attractive and reminded me of a slightly frazzled character from one of Pedro Almodóvar’s early films. That she made herself even taller by wearing three-inch platform sandals only added to her charm. She was relieved I spoke Spanish, she said, because her English was “not good,” and I was alarmed that she thought I spoke Spanish. Because I don’t really speak Spanish, I speak a kind of Los Angeles pidgin Spanglish
.
But it didn’t seem to bother Pilar, who just shrugged and said, “We don’t get a lot of opportunities to speak English anymore here.”

We decided we would muddle through together. The mayor spoke fluent German, which is admirable, but wasn’t much help.

José Carmelo Jorge Blanco is an extremely affable, some might say
simpático
, individual, quick to smile and outwardly intelligent. When Pilar and I entered his office, the sixty-two-year-old grinned like a bemused optometrist. Which it turns out is what he is when he’s not overseeing the municipality. He doesn’t take a salary for serving the citizens of Vera, he just likes doing it.

We sat down at a large conference table made of highly polished black wood. The chairs matched the table and were upholstered in red velvet. It all looked impressive and old, like it was left over from a TV show about the Spanish Inquisition.

The mayor began by saying, “
Vera Playa es diferente. Muy singular en el mundo
.”

I nodded. Vera Playa is a unique place. No doubt.

“How did this unique place come about?”

Pilar translated my question to the mayor. He thought about it and said, “The government has defined this type of nudity, we respect it and defend it. All the different political parties and groups in this city, all of them, defend
turismo naturista
.”