Turkey – Shock, Complaints,Tattoos and Resignation

At this point I think I was determined not to completely enjoy the ‘All Inclusive’ experience because in a snooty sort of way I have come to think of myself as a traveller rather than a holidaymaker or a tourist and I started straight away to find things to dislike.

First of all the apartment, which was a ground floor basement room and I always find these semi-subterranean arrangements to be rather sad and dark and exposed – I don’t like basement rooms.  It was well appointed and had all the facilities that we had been promised and expected but basement rooms are designed for Hobbits who live below ground level and all that we could see from our sun starved balcony were people’s sunburnt legs walking by.

I returned to reception and asked if we could possibly be moved to a room on the first or second floor but the receptionist said that that this would be quite impossible.  I told her that I had a fear of earthquakes and being buried alive but she showed no sympathy for my feigned phobia and turned away to deal with another guest.

And so I returned to the room and looked for a technical or repair issue and found it when I discovered that the balcony door wouldn’t lock and I went straight back to reception to demand a repair or a move and the receptionist promised that it would be dealt with within the next few minutes.  I told her that if it wasn’t then I would expect to be moved to a room on the first or second floor because I was nervous about security issues especially as there were young children in the room and I gave her a look which said ‘you really wouldn’t want a Madeleine incident would you?’

And so I returned to the room and we went for a walk around the gardens confident that we would shortly be moved and do you know what? By the time we got back the buggers had fixed it so I had nothing else to complain about.  Actually it broke again a couple of days later but by then I was a lot more chilled out and Sally and the girls had rearranged the room in the way that they like it, rather like Belgium after the German Panzer division had passed through on the way to France in 1939, so I really couldn’t face the prospect of packing and unpacking and I just let the matter drop.

In between all this whinging we did indeed walk through gardens that were splashed with sunshine like a Monet painting and where swifts and martins dipped and swerved in the warm corners and my irritation began to evaporate.  Behind the hotel were charcoal black mountains decorated with pine trees and in the fertile valleys below were citrus groves with oranges ripening in the sun and suddenly away from the hotel there was the warm smell of the Mediterranean and in the gentle late afternoon breeze the heady smell of jasmine wafting through the pergolas filled the air.

There was a real danger here that I might drop my moaning mood and start to enjoy myself but then we went to the restaurant for evening meal.  I understand that dinner time at the Suntopia Tropical was once used as an initiation test for new recruits to the Soviet Army but it was discontinued because it was considered too tough even for this.  The food, it has to be said, was very good indeed but the restaurant ambiance was like Dante’s inferno!  Wooden chairs being scraped across tiled floors, cutlery being dropped on the floor, children running about and shouting, parents bawling instructions and the constant attention of the cleaning up crews who, if you weren’t careful would whip your plate away from under your nose even before you had finished.

Meal times were also great training for the ‘World Pushing In Championships’ but I am going to tell you about that later…

It was in the dining room that I first noticed the tattoos, because the amount of body art on display here was absolutely incredible and almost as many women as men with painted arms and legs proudly showing them off.  Personally I cannot understand why anyone, unless they are a Maori, would want to disfigure themselves in this way but here at Suntopia Tropical it seemed as though they were almost in the majority.  Here there were bodies decorated with lions, wolves and dragons, goblins, fairies and skulls, a comprehensive A to Z of boy’s and girl’s names and more Indian braves than General Custer had to fight at the Battle of the Little Big Horn!

So, this was a mixed sort of day and at the end when the children were asleep and in bed and I was sitting on the underground balcony drinking a fourth or fifth gin and tonic I began to wonder what I was doing here and then the penny dropped and I had a quiet word with myself.  This might not be the sort of place that I would choose for myself but I suddenly realised that this holiday wasn’t about me – I was here to give my grandchildren a good time – it was all about them and in that moment my mood relaxed and I was at peace with myself and so I went to the bar and ordered a sixth gin and tonic!

Northern Spain – Sigüenza to Atienza on the Ruta de Don Quixote

In a day of unpredictable weather the sun was shining when we stepped out of the dark interior of the cathedral with only occasional summer cotton wool ball clouds in the sky and because it had been rather overcast when we first walked to the castle we decided to do so again.

This wasn’t too much of a chore because it was only a few hundred metres past the hotel on Calle Valencia which ran the whole length of the town.  Outside the hotel an old drinking spring was bubbling and gurgling and splashing cool water like gentle rain from a fountain into an ornamental trough and we walked back up the hill to the very top of the town.  And after we had satisfied ourselves that we had captured the pictures that we wanted we looked for an alternative route back to the Plaza Mayor and found a footpath that ran around the back of the Alcazar and then dropped down below the towering cliffs on which it stood looming high above us and looking proud and impregnable.

On the way we spotted a small market and sensing a shopping opportunity and so that we should get there as quickly as possible Kim led me down a muddy and precarious path which came to an old bridge over the Rio Henares which even after the rain was barely a sticky trickle and then to the jumble of stalls that lined the river bank.  The first part of the market was vegetables and market garden stalls and in a second section there were second-hand clothing and junk stalls run by gypsies and the only one that mildly interested me was a stall selling various infusions as alternative remedies and reliefs for almost every known common ailment.

Leaving the market it occurred to us that we had practically done everything there was to do in Sigüenza and it was only just past lunch time so we walked to the railway station to see if there was any possibility of catching a train to another city on our ‘to visit’ list, Zaragoza.  The station was curiously quiet, there were no staff on duty and the main hall was being used by a group of small boys playing indoor football.  We found a timetable but it revealed a train service so infrequent that it was practically useless so we abandoned that idea and decided to drive to nearby Atienza instead.

The journey to the nearby town followed the western section of a circular tour which is part of the Ruta de Don Quixote, in fact stage ten of the route which sprawls across all of Castilla-La Mancha, and after a climbing section of hairpin bends with rear view mirror views of Sigüenza bathed in sunlight the road reached a plateau with a long straight road, a ribbon of charcoal tarmac cutting through the fields and riding the contours of the land like a gently undulating roller-coaster.

Either side of the long straight road there were vast open fields with the most attractive colours that rolled rhythmically and desolately away in all directions with a stunning vista of subtle hues and variations of tone; champagne and parchment, butter-milk cream, dusty olive, lavender grey, gleaming gold and russet red all lying crushed under the burden of what was now a vivid blue spring sky.

Eventually we arrived in tiny Atienza and walked through the stone town with its crumbling colonnades and rusting iron balconies and then eased the car to the very top of the town where a castle in a commanding position overlooked the plateau in all directions.  The castle had played an important role in the Reconquista but had been destroyed by French troops during the War of Independence (the Peninsular War) and now two hundred years later it is waiting its turn in the programme of castle restorations and I got a sense that it might have to be patient.

There was quite a steep walk from the car park to the ruined towers and with rain on the next hill sweeping down the valley towards us like a curtain of chain-mail we quickly abandoned any thoughts of walking to the very top and dashed for the shelter of the car and drove back to Sigüenza through yet more changeable weather.

It was late afternoon now so after stocking up on wine and beer and olive oil crisps we sat in the room, read our books and waited for the fire to ignite.  By six o’clock there was no sign of life so I investigated the controls and although they were all in impenetrable technical Spanish I stabbed a few buttons and generally interfered with the settings without having a clue what I was doing and eventually it made some encouraging noises and I achieved ignition!

As it approached evening meal time we left the Cuatro Canos and as we judged it too early to eat in a town where the restaurants didn’t appear to open until way past nine o’clock (being English we like to eat at about seven) we decided to walk the long way round to the town centre and we talk a third stroll to the castle under the waxy glow of the ornamental street lights and through the labyrinth of narrow streets, curious corners, dead-ends and intriguing alleyways, through the Plaza Mayor where there was a children’s candle lantern launching and live music and then below the exterior of the cathedral where the church bells were ringing in anticipation of Palm Sunday tomorrow.

We were right, it was too early for the restaurant to be open for business but they assured us it would open shortly and gave us complimentary drinks so that we wouldn’t slip away while they prepared the dining room and eventually it was ready and we enjoyed a second good Castilian meal at Le Meson and then returned to the room where the fire in the corner was standing cold and silent.

Northern Spain – Sigüenza, the Alcazar and the Plaza Mayor

The soporific combination of a dark room and a quiet street with only whispered footsteps outside meant that we slept until quite late and were only woken when the fire in the corner of the room cranked into life at nine o’clock.  This didn’t matter however because breakfast wasn’t served until half past.

The breakfast turned out to be quite excellent consisting of tostado con tomate, ham, egg and cheese, pancakes and Madeira cake all served fresh.  The only problem that arose was with the tea and this I concluded was a consequence of the absence of English guests staying at the Posada.  I was offered green, peppermint or a variety of different fruit teas but no English breakfast or simple black.  We eventually established what it was that I wanted and I felt bad about that when the waitress was sent out hurriedly to the shops to buy some.  After she returned I finally got my pot of tea but it was served luke warm and I was forced to conclude that in remote parts of Spain they are not very good at making tea!  It didn’t spoil the breakfast though.

It was mid morning by the time we left the hotel and there was a simple choice – up the hill to the Alcazar or down to the Cathedral.  We decided to start at the top of the town and make our way to the bottom.  Lined on each side with caramel coloured houses with terracotta tiled roofs, the Calle de Valencia followed the line of the old medieval town wall and half way to the castle we passed through the Puerto del Porto Mayor which was once the main gateway into the narrow streets of the old town and from here there was a final twisting climb to the Plaza del Castillo and the Parador Hotel.

The Parador Hotels are classy places well beyond our limited budget and can be found all over Spain.  These were originally a State owned chain and were luxury hotels in old castles, palaces, convents, monasteries and other historic buildings that were established to promote quality tourism, to act as guardian of the national and artistic heritage of Spain and to assist poorer regions to attract more visitors.  They are no longer owned by the State and during the recession have begun to suffer financial difficulties but there didn’t appear to be a drastic shortage of guests this morning.

The present day castle was built in the twelfth century but there has been a fortress here since the Visigoths built the first in the fifth century.  Later as the Northern Kings led the Reconquest of Spain the Moors constructed a new castle on the same site but in 1124, the crusading ecclesiastic knight, Bernardo de Agen took possession of the castle and began the Christian repopulation and the building of the Christian Alcazar.

The castle was extended and remodelled at various times between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries but was partially destroyed in 1811 during the French occupation. It again suffered damage during the Carlist Wars and during the Spanish Civil War when Sigüenza became part of the front line fighting during the Aragon campaign. It had to be almost completely rebuilt after that so although it now suffers the indignity of being a hotel at least we have the Parador initiative to thank for what we see today.

It was possible to walk around parts of the old external areas but there is no getting away from the fact that the interior of the old castle is a hotel so with little or nothing to see except the reception desk and a couple of reproduction suits of armour we didn’t stay long and made our way down a narrow stone street towards the Plaza Mayor.

The weather was proving very inconsistent and there was no way of confidently predicting which way it would go as it changed without warning through intermittent periods of sunshine, cloud, blue sky and then squally showers when rain fell like tiny lead fishing weights and the temperature fluctuated wildly.  To dodge the showers we reached the pedestrianised fifteenth century Plaza Mayor via a number of churches, historic houses and artisans craft shops until we eventually reached the central square of the town which although wouldn’t get into my personal top five Plaza Mayor was very pleasant indeed with renaissance architecture, balconies and covered colonnades, palaces and the magnificent cathedral with history etched into every stone and dripping like honey off the walls.

There was no activity in the Plaza today and it was too cold for the bars to set up their tables outside so it didn’t take us long to wander through the stone pillars and across the cobbles and we left the square and made our way to the cathedral which was where we were going next.

Northern Spain – Footballers Wines and a Bronpi Stove

“I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than most countries.  How easy it is to make friends in Spain!”                                                                                                        George Orwell - ‘Homage to Catalonia’

Eventually we left the A2 Autovia and took a minor road for the final twenty-five kilometres to Sigüenza and as we did we began to climb because we were entering the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, part of the Sistema Central which is one of those east-west mountain ranges that extend through Spain that before high speed rail and modern motorways that have bored straight through them kept the Spanish people historically separated.

We climbed gently to over one thousand metres to an elevation that had suppressed the first signs of Spring and then without warning we turned a corner and there sitting handsomely in the natural folds of the landscape was a towering castle (a Parador hotel of course), medieval walls and a honey coloured cathedral surrounded by a mantle of terracotta roofs and ribbons of tiny lanes.

I inevitably got lost in the labyrinth of streets and a confusing one-way system but Sigüenza is only a small town so it didn’t take long to make the necessary corrections, find the well disguised hotel and get checked in.  This was the Casa Rural Posada los Cuatro Canos and I had chosen it because of its high scores from previous guests, because it was inexpensive (naturally) and because of the one hundred and twenty-five previous guest reviews, one hundred and twenty-three were Spanish and none from the UK.

The down side of course to choosing a place not used to English guests was the language barrier and so checking in was a longer than usual process and involved the translation services of a mobile phone but the owner was friendly, seemed genuinely pleased to see us and invited us to settle in.

We had a charming second-floor room with stone walls and wooden ceiling beams, terracotta floor tiles, small window terraces with iron balcony rails and on account of the cool weather a large stove in the corner, a groaning monster delivering more heat than strictly necessary, spitting sparks and wheezing like an asthmatic after a long walk but it was cosy, very cosy and we liked it.

Normally on arrival at a destination we would make straight for the Plaza Mayor but on account of the rather disappointing weather Kim decided to stay put by the fire and I went into town alone to find a shop for some beer and wine.  Coming from the UK where recent temperatures had struggled to get above zero I didn’t find it too cold but the local people were all wrapped up and well protected and in the bars and bodegas people sat in the windows looking mournfully out into the damp street – there were certainly no outside tables and chairs here today!

I found a shop and selected some wine, a Rioja of course, my favourite, and was talked into a second bottle of local origin from the winery of the Barcelona and Spain footballer Andrés Iniesta from Albacete and with his name on the label there was premium to pay and it was twice the price of the Rioja.  I returned to the room and we spent the late afternoon and early evening enjoying the heat from the fire and the simple pleasure of being away from home after a very long Winter.

Later in the evening after it had turned dark we tore ourselves away from the comfort of the room and made our way into the town stopping first at the Tourist Information office to pick up leaflets and a map and then with our heads full of recommendations and advice we walked to the Plaza Mayor and the Cathedral square and we were comforted by a clear sky and a full moon casting flickering shadows through and along the narrow streets.

Eventually we agreed upon a restaurant that we both liked and although it was curiously empty for a Friday night the staff didn’t seem to mind that we were the only two customers and we selected traditional food from the unhelpful menu and chose well because we both enjoyed a fine meal.

It wasn’t particularly late when we left Le Meson but except for a few bars the town was clearly having an early night so we strolled back to Los Cuatro Canos where, as the fire had now gone out we had an early night of our own.

Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Fire Mountain, Lanzarote

The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope. The final results were announced on 31^st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited and having completed that I thought I might come up with a personal alternative twelve.  The original twelve quite rightly included Mount Tiede on the Canary Island of Tenerife but, at number five, my alternative is Fire Mountain on nearby Lanzarote.

In December 1983 together with some friends I had a holiday on the island  and on a day trip out visited the volcanic National Park called Timanfaya.

After a couple of days of visiting the beach and sitting around in bars we decided to do some sightseeing around the island so we walked into the commercial area of Puerto Del Carmen where we were staying and found a car hire office with the sort of prices that suited our budget – cheap – and you only get what you pay for of course because being at the lower end of the scale we were allocated a clapped out old grey/blue Daihatsu Jeep which despite being worn out seemed perfect for what we had in mind.  First things first though and after taking possession of the rattling bone shaker we had to quickly find a fuel station because the fuel indicator was hovering somewhere just below empty!

The weather was poor that day and thick clouds kept racing in from the Atlantic Ocean, mostly steely grey but sometimes black and ominous and bulging with moisture which promptly fell as heavy rain as soon as they crossed the coast and raced inland.  After breakfast we pulled on what we thought might be suitably warm clothing and headed off in a northerly direction to the Parque Nacional de Timanfaya.

The temperature was comfortable by the coast but it soon began to plummet as we drove into the interior of the island and started to climb and we weren’t prepared for that and it wasn’t long before we began to regret not bringing even more clothes along (or even the blankets from the beds in the apartment) because it was soon very, very cold indeed with frequent rain squalls and a stinging wind that lashed our legs and faces.

As we had a four wheel drive we thought we might test its capabilities so rather than follow the tarmac highway we went off road and tried to plot our own course.  We got hopelessly lost of course and at one point came across a surprised islander, a whiskered old lady in rusty black clothes, and asked for directions to the park.  I can’t be sure but I think she said that the sensible thing was to go back to the main road because this was safer and even though she was quite insistent about this we ignored her advice and carried on along a boulder strewn track that tipped and lurched the vehicle for the next few kilometres until eventually we came to the boundary to the Parque Nacional de Timanfaya marked by a sign carrying the mischievous El Diablo (The Devil) logo.

The emblem of Lanzarote is a demon because the early settlers interpreted their first experience of a volcanic eruption as the work of the devil.  It was so cold today that we would have welcomed some sort of volcanic activity I can tell you!

We arrived at the visitor’s car park and that was as far as we could drive into the park and there we tagged on to some coach party trips and watched several demonstrations by a sun gnarled old man with a face of leather and knotted hands of ‘how hot‘ the area is because temperatures just a few metres below the surface here reach between 400°C and 600°C!   First of all he threw dry brush into a harmless looking hole in the ground and it immediately caught fire, while water poured into a bore hole erupted seconds later in the form of steam – like a mini-geyser and he finished this off by demonstrating a natural gas vent that doubles as a BBQ!

There was a coach tour into the National Park and around the volcanic craters but instead of the comfortable seat option we choose an alternative camel ride which involved a thirty minute circuit of the craters on a form of transport that even made the Jeep seem comfortable!

To be honest we were glad when the camel excursion was over, it might have been the preferred transport option of Lawrence of Arabia but we were just pleased to get back to the Daihatsu and drive away in a westerly direction.  We were making our way now towards the old capital of the island called Teguise where islanders used to take refuge from the coastal storms and from pirate raids and had built themselves an impressive fortress at the highest point with commanding views over most of the island.

This was the Santa Bárbara castle and it turned out that only that year there had been a complete restoration by the Fine Arts Association and on account of being some of the first visitors to the restored attraction it had a most non–medieval feel about it but having paid the entrance fee we visited the museum and wandered around the castle walls until we collectively agreed that it was time to leave and make our way back through the island capital, Arrecife and back to the relative warmth of the coastal strip.

It was still quite early and I innocently asked what we were going to do for the rest of the day?  Richard gave me a withering look, rolled his eyes skywards and said ‘have you got no imagination?’ and we spent the remainder of the day in the comfort of the bars of Puerto del Carmen.

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Other posts about Volcanoes:

Mount Vesuvius

Yellowstone Park

Iceland

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Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Benidorm

“By the end…it was clear that Spain’s spiritual and cultural isolation was at an end, overwhelmed by the great alien invasion from the North of money and freedoms.  Spain became the most visited tourist country in the World, and slowly, as the foreigners poured in, its identity was submerged, its life-style altered more in a single decade than in the previous century.”                      Norman Lewis, ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope. The final results were announced on 31^st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited and having completed that I thought I might come up with a personal alternative twelve.  The original twelve included San Sebastián in the Basque Country but my alternative holiday beach city of Benidorm and I include it here at number six.

In the first few years of the 1960s my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vanguard Vickers airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   

 

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well. 

Sixty years ago Benidorm, although not a fishing village as such, was still a modest beach side community, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees – the sort of place that Norman Lewis would have recognised.  Small fishing boats, the tarrafes, each with four large lanterns to attract fish at night bobbed in the water or lay drawn up resting on the sand.  In 1950, Benidorm didn’t attract many visitors and life was difficult, it had no water supply or sewage disposal system and waste was tipped in the sea or simply buried in the earth.

The watershed year was 1954 when the Franco loyalist, Pedro Zaragoza Orts was nominated as town Alcalde and threw himself into his work and set himself an objective of improving the quality of life in the small town.  In terms of economic potential there wasn’t a lot to work with so he decided to concentrate on tourism and he imagined a dream of creating a bourgeois pan-European holiday utopia.  Benidorm had sun, it had beaches, it had sea but what it didn’t have was visitors.

Zaragoza recognised the potential of increased numbers of visitors and quickly created the Plan General de Ordenación, or city building plan, that would exploit that potential.  The plan ensured that every building would have an area of leisure land, guaranteeing a future free of the excesses of cramped construction seen in other areas of Spain and it is the only city in the country that still adheres to this rigid rule.  This vision for the future took six years to come to reality, while he waited he piped in domestic water from Polop, fifteen kilometres to the north in the mountains on the road to Guadalest and he ignited the building boom that followed and the flying start that Benidorm achieved in the package tour boom of the 1960s and 70s.

The vision for Benidorm was simultaneously brilliant and exciting and it gave the modern city its modern unique landscape because Zaragoza encouraged vertical construction of dozens of sky scrapers in a deliberate plan to make efficient use of land and to keep the city at ground level spacious and airy with green parks and open spaces and all of the accommodation relatively close to the beaches.  He explained his plan like this; ‘If you build low, you occupy all the space and have a long walk to the beach. If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts’.  This was in contrast to nearby Torrevieja and on the Costa Del Sol in the south, Marbella where excessive horizontal development led to great sprawling ugly urbanisations that have practically destroyed the coast by burying it under concrete and tarmac.  Zaragoza called this urban concentration instead of urban sprawl.

The first developments started at the centre at the rocky outcrop in the twisting narrow streets hemmed in by claustrophobic whitewashed houses, the San Jaime church with its distinctive blue tiled hat roofs, the old town promontory with the Balcon Del Mediterraneo, and pretty Mal Pas beach below and quickly spread east and west along the splendid beaches.  Today Benidorm has some of the tallest buildings not only in Spain but all of Europe but the first were fairly modest by comparison, the tallest reaching only a modest ten floors or so.

If Pedro Zaragoza Orts is remembered for the Beni-York skyscraper he is even more famous for the so called ‘War of the Bikini’.  In the later years of the 1950s the icon of holiday liberty was the saucy two piece swimsuit but in staunchly religious Spain, still held in the firm two-handed grip of church and state, this scanty garment was seen as a threat to the very basis of Catholic society.  

And it certainly had this effect in Spain and although occasionally allowable on the sandy beaches, it had to be covered up in all other areas; on the promenades and in the plazas and in the shops and the bars and cafés for fear of causing any offence.  In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite a beach wearing only a bikini, was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there.  After an argument she hit him, and her strike for social justice cost her a hefty fine of forty thousand pesetas.

Zaragoza needed tourists and tourists wanted the bikini and with more northern European tourists arriving each year in search of an all over suntan the Mayor knew that the banning of the two piece swimsuit simply couldn’t be sustained or allowed to threaten his ambitious plans.

Zaragoza took a gamble and signed a municipal order which permitted the wearing of the bikini in public areas and in this single act he effectively jump-started the Spanish tourist industry.  Zaragoza said: “People had to feel free to be able to wear what they wanted, within reason, if it helped them to enjoy themselves as they would come back and tell their friends about the place.”  In deeply religious Catholic Spain not everyone was so understanding or welcoming of the bikini however and in retaliation the Archbishop of Valencia began the excommunication process against him. 

Excommunication was a serious matter in 1959 and his political supporters began to abandon him so one day he got up early and drove for nine hours on a little Vespa scooter to Madrid to lobby Franco himself.  The Generalissimo was suitably impressed with his determination and gave him his support, Zaragoza returned to Benidorm and the Church backed down and the approval of the bikini became a defining moment in the history of modern Spain ultimately changing the course of Spanish tourism and causing a social revolution in an austere country groaning under the yoke of the National Catholic regime.  Zaragoza went on to become Franco’s Director of Tourism and a Parliamentary Deputy.

For people who had never been abroad before Benidorm must have been an exciting place in the early 1960s.  Palm fringed boulevards, Sangria by the jug full and, unrestrained by optics, generous measures of whiskey and gin, rum and vodka.  Eating outside at a pavement café and ordering drinks and not paying for them until leaving and scattering unfamiliar coins on the table as a tip for the waiter.  There was permanent sunshine, a delightful warm sea and unfamiliar food, although actually I seem to doubt that they would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on these holidays because to be fair anything remotely ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people they weren’t really ready for tortilla and gazpacho, tapas or paella. 

Benidorm is a fascinating place, often unfairly maligned or sneered at but my grandparents liked it and I have been there myself in 1977 for a fortnight’s holiday and then again on a day trip in 2008 just out of curiosity.  It has grown into a mature and unique high rise resort with blue flag beaches and an ambition to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status and I hope it achieves it. 

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Other posts about Benidorm:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

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Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the postcard images

Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Ávila, The Pride and The Passion

The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope. The final results were announced on 31^st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited and having completed that I thought I might come up with a personal alternative twelve.

My number ten is the walled city of  in Castilla y Leon and I have included it because for me, when I visited the city and stayed there  it was one of those exceeds expectation moments.

The old city of Ávila is completely enclosed within a medieval wall and as our hotel was inside it we drove through one of the main gates and into tangle of narrow streets and immediately got lost and confused.  Just as things were beginning to look hopeless we found a tourist information office and went inside for help.  The man at the desk explained that parking was very difficult (we’d guessed that already) and that it would be best to go back out of the old city and park in a public car park nearby.  He gave me a street map that looked like a bowl of spaghetti and told me that it was too difficult for him to try to explain how to get out and that I should just drive around until I could find a gate.

In the morning we took the walk around the old city and first of all we walked past the serrated edged walls of the cathedral which was designed to serve a dual purpose, part religious and part military because the apse actually forms part of the defensive city walls and then we passed out through one of the main gates that led us to the Plaza de Santa Teresa, the Plaza Mayor of the city, which we found to be unusually quiet for a Saturday morning.

We walked for a while around the eastern side of the walls which are claimed to the best preserved in all of Spain and although they have had some recent renovation still manage to retain the spirit of an impregnable medieval granite fortress.  It is two and a half kilometres long with two thousand five hundred battlements, eighty-eight cylindrical towers, six main gates and three smaller pedestrian gates.

Ávila was used in the 1957 film ‘The Pride and the Passion’ that starred Cary Grant, Sophia Loren and Frank Sinatra when a group of Spanish nationalists during the war of independence (What we normally call the The Peninsula War) lugged a huge gun up the mountains to attack the city and liberate it from the French invaders.   It was based on the book ‘The Gun’, written by C S Forrester.

We paid the €4 fee and received long winded instructions on how to find the four separate entrances to which our tickets entitled us entrance and then climbed the steps to the top of the wall.  There were excellent views of the town, of the sweeping countryside beyond and the Storks sitting on their untidy piles of sticks on top of the Cathedral and other buildings.

We thought that Ávila seemed nicer than Toledo (our previous stop) and friendlier too because all of the information boards on the wall and in the town were thoughtfully translated into English.  There were an awful lot of steps to negotiate on the wall and because not all of the upper walkway was open this involved having to double back a lot as well to get to the exits.

The walk continued around the towering walls but it became a bit repetitive and we tired of the reoccurring turrets and the seemingly endless walk so we abandoned the top of the wall and returned to street level and walked around the exterior instead.  After about an hour we re-entered the city at the Puerta de Santa Teresa on the west side and walked through the twisted narrow streets through the commercial centre and the market place and then deftly bypassed the shops back to the cathedral and casually strolled through the narrow cobbled streets and through the municipal fish and meat market back to where we had started and looked for somewhere suitable for a later than usual first drink of the day.

We came across a charming and traditional little bodega squeezed into the walls of the city in between two high towers and once inside found a table and ordered some drinks and were delighted to find that when they arrived they were accompanied by an inevitable complimentary plates of tapas, but we weren’t going to complain about that!

P&O Mini-Cruise – Hull to Rotterdam

Normally I take a low cost airline flight to a chosen destination but with a bargain price of £23 each for a return ferry crossing from Hull to Rotterdam this was too good an opportunity to miss. My son, Jonathan, was due to come and stay for a few days and with the weather too bad for golf then I needed alternative plans that would get him out of bed by mid-afternoon.

P&O Mini-Cruise, Hull to Rotterdam

Once on board we wandered around the maze of narrow corridors on deck ten searching among five hundred and forty-six identical looking cabins until we finally found our inner berth shoebox and after we had negotiated sleeping arrangements in a fair and democratic way I bagged the bottom bunk and let Jonathan practice using the flimsy aluminium ladder to get on top.

One of the rules of the crossing is that passengers cannot take alcohol on board the boat – not because P&O have anything against alcohol it is just that they would rather prefer it if you buy it on board at one of their bars rather than from a supermarket in Hull so without any smuggled on beer or wine there wasn’t a great deal to hang around for in the cabin so we made our way to the Sky lounge and the Sunset bar at the very top of the ship to see the sunset that was dipping down over the River Humber to the west.

Actually, the Humber isn’t really a river at all because for its entire length after it originates at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Trent of less than sixty kilometres it is technically an estuary but this didn’t matter to us as we watched a flaming red sun make its grand exit for the day as it slipped slowly below the skyline somewhere over the English Midlands and we hoped that the red sky would mean that we would have a good day tomorrow in the Netherlands.

There was now two hours or so before departure so we sat and caught up on news and gossip and planned our itinerary for the day in Holland while we waited for the captain to announce that we were leaving and the nine thousand tonne, two hundred and fifteen metre long ship finally moved effortlessly away from the quayside at the beginning of its two hundred nautical mile overnight journey across the North Sea to the Rotterdam Europort to the south-east.

First it had to leave the Humber estuary and it glided past the port of Immingham to the south which is so big it handles the largest quantity of goods by weight in the UK and by day is an untidy, grimy place dominated by ugly petro-chemical works and soulless grey industrial buildings but by night is transformed into a Manhattan like skyline of tall buildings and bright lights and occasional dancing plumes of flames burning off excess gases which actually makes it all look rather attractive.

The ferry has a passenger capacity of one thousand, three hundred and sixty but tonight there were barely three hundred people on board (which explained the bargain fare) so it felt spacious and relaxing as we enjoyed our drinks, visited the duty-free shops and had an excellent all you can eat buffet (and for someone who doesn’t really like all you can eat buffets, I really do mean excellent) during which we collected bread, cheese and ham for a do-it-yourself breakfast the next morning and then finished the evening in the Sunset Show Lounge where a live band was knocking out disco classics and the stag and hen parties were getting more and more boisterous and noisy.

I don’t know what time it closed however because some time around midnight we called an end to the proceedings and retired to our room.  Once Jonathan had negotiated the climbing arrangements to the top bunk I made myself comfortable in a bed that was surprisingly cosy and it didn’t take many minutes until the low rhythmic heartbeat of the engine somewhere deep in the belly of the ship nudged me into a sound sleep.

P&O Mini-Cruise, The Humber Bridge and The Deep

Normally I take a low cost airline flight to a chosen destination but with a bargain price of £23 each for a return ferry crossing from Hull to Rotterdam this was too good an opportunity to miss. My son, Jonathan, was due to come and stay for a few days and with the weather too bad for golf then I needed alternative plans that would get him out of bed by mid-afternoon.

The P&O website makes everything sound rather grand and markets the North Sea crossing like this:

‘Mini cruises to Amsterdam include a 2-night stay, travelling in style in one of our ensuite cabins and taking advantage of a host of facilities onboard. You will find a fantastic range of dining experiences with the famous West End Langan’s Brasserie and our Four Seasons buffet restaurant. After your meal why not relax in one of our stylish bars, take in a film at the cinema or even join the high-rollers in the casino? There is also live entertainment for the whole family, plus hundreds of great deals can be found in our onboard shop’.

I have never been cruising so this all sounded rather seductive until the truth dawned that this wasn’t really a cruise at all but just a simple ferry crossing, that I wouldn’t need my dinner jacket and that there was no chance of being invited to the captain’s table because he would be too busy negotiating the ship through the busy shipping lanes of the North Sea regions of Humber and Thames.

It was a Tuesday evening crossing and so in the early afternoon we crossed from Lincolnshire to Yorkshire over the 2,220 metre Humber Suspension Bridge which is the fifth largest of its type in the World.  This is a big bridge but the statistic used to be even more impressive because when it was first opened in 1981 it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the World for the next sixteen years and the road-distance between Hull and Grimsby was reduced by nearly eighty kilometres as a consequence of the construction.

A sad fact associated with the bridge is that it is a favourite jumping place for people committing or attempting suicide. More than two hundred incidents of people jumping or falling from the bridge have taken place since it was opened and only five have survived so it is a fairly reliable way of doing yourself in!  As a result, plans were announced in December 2009 to construct a suicide barrier along the walkways of the bridge but this was never implemented with design constraints being cited as the reason but it probably had something to do with cost and now there is talk of installing a Samaritan’s Hot line on the bridge instead – so that should put a stop to it!

It was far too early to go to the ferry dock so my plan was to fill the afternoon with a visit to The Deep, which is an aquarium built on a regenerated site where the muddy river Hull joins the grey waters of the Humber and on the site of the now disused Hull shipyards and docks.  On account of the fact that I have got a one year pass that gives me free entry until next June and I am determined to get full value from this I have visited The Deep several times but Jonathan had never been so I dragged him along in the hope that he would like an afternoon looking at fish and insects just as much as I would.

It’s an interesting attraction, surprisingly good for a place like Hull, and it kept us amused for an hour or so as we passed through the fish tanks and the exhibits, the sharks and the rays, the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the Twilight Zone of the Pacific Ocean but there was still time to spare after we had completed the visit so we took a walk along the old quayside of the Estuary to the Hull Marina.

It is almost certain that people have been trading from the point where the River Hull joins the Humber since before the Norman Conquest. Trading ships regularly sailed up the River Hull to the major port of Beverley further inland and there developed important trade in wool and wine with Flanders in France. A port developed on the west bank of the river and by the Middle Ages defensive walls surrounded the vital port to the west and north, with the two rivers completing the defences. So important had trade become to the port that King Edward I granted a charter and the town became ‘Kingstown-upon-Hull’ in 1299.

Restored and gentrified it is hard to imagine what a grim place this must once of been as we walked through the yachting marina where expensive boats where moored alongside each other but soon it started to rain so without a full change of clothes in our overnight bags and not wanting to get a soaking we made our way back to the car park and then on to the King George Dock to find our ferry where we went through the ticketing process and were allocated our cabin so made our way through customs and onto the ship.