Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Apr 02, 2008 - 08:55 AM HumanInterest

Former mayor of Benidorm Pedro Zaragoza died yesterday, aged 85. Zaragoza turned Benidorm from an impoverished fisihing village into the major resort it is today. He is most famous for allowing bikinis to be worn, in the face of opposition from Spanish conservatives including the Catholic Church, which threatened him with excommunication. However, his vision was broader and more far-reaching than that, for he was the first person to see the importance of vertical tourism, a concept which shaped the development of Benidorm (I have to point out here for the benefit of those who have never visited Benidorm that it is a fine town, with broad avenues and all its 330 skyscrapers facing the sea. In other words, it is a nice place). And you have only to look at the awful mess that the recent explosion of low-level development has created on both Spanish and Portuguese costas to see that he was right. If the tourism sector had heroes, Pedro Zaragoza would be a great name, an Alexander Fleming, a Marconi or a Descartes among resort planners. More of this story.

Benidorm had a population of less than 2,000 when Zaragoza became mayor in the 1950's (by appointment, not election, it was the height of the Francoist dictatorship). Benidorm's permanent population now is 70,000, but this number swells to over half a million in the summer. So how do they all fit in? Amazingly well - on top of each other, in high buildings which, though they look dreadful from a distance (especially to low-rise-brainwashed British viewers), are mostly quite attractive when you are among them. Even the beach, artificially broadened with sand from the Moroccan Sahara, is quite ample unless you insist on laying out your towel next to the water, in which case your neighbours are likely to be only inches away. Benidorm is, I insist, a spacious, gracious place, a little delapidated in parts but generally light and airy and likeable.

Zaragoza's major contribution to Benidorm was to ensure that the town planners had their say before the developers did. The Plan General de Ordenación (town development plan) adopted in 1954 stipulated that there had to be a large area of "free" space around every building, the larger the building, the bigger the space. The result is that Benidorm is almost never claustrophobic.

There was more. Zaragoza also foresaw the vital importance of water supply in a relatively arid part of the Valencia region. He is often credited with inventing the Benidorm International Song Contest which introduced Julio Iglesias to the world, though this is of more interest to Spaniards than international visitors (in fact, even assiduous British visitors often forget that Benidorm was conceived as much to cater to the then emerging Spanish middle class tourists as to those from abroad). And the Times obituary of Pedro Zaragoza (April 2, 2008) is headlined "Pedro Zaragoza, inventor of the package holiday, dies." In fact, he didn't invent the package holiday (Thomas Cook did) and Benidorm wasn't even the first mass package holiday destination in Spain (Torremolinos was). But Benidorm did attract package holiday tourism on a scale not seen before. Tens of thousands of Britons and North Europeans began to arrive in the sixties, making Spain the mass tourism centre of the Mediterranean. Even today (reports El País), Benidorm accounts for 40% of tourism in the Valencia region and 7% of that in the whole of Spain.