Every Picture Tells a Story – Benidorm c1960

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.

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The Search For Real Spain

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With an area of just over five hundred thousand square kilometers Spain is the second largest country in Western Europe after France and with an average altitude of six hundred and fifty metres it is second highest country in Europe after Switzerland. That is a lot of country to try and see and visit and with so many northern European ex-pats living down the eastern coastal strip then the chances of experiencing the real Spain was always going to be difficult to achieve in this part of the country.

On a visit to eastern Spain it occured to me that there must be more to the country than beaches and condominiums and so the search for real spain begins…

Spain, Las Ramblas, last day crisis

 

This was our last day in Spain and with a mid afternoon flight and all morning to get to Alicanté we had planned for a relaxing morning and a leisurely drive back to the airport.  I couldn’t lie in of course because when I wake up it’s a bit like switching a light on; a simply cannot doze and think about it I just have to be up and away and out in the sun.  Tea on the terrace of course as usual and when Richard had joined me we finished off the last of the food and had a continental breakfast consisting of fruit, ham, cheese and yoghurt and after breakfast Richard set about cleaning the apartment from top to bottom in his usual thorough style.  I do confess to feeling a bit guilty as I sat on the patio doing sudoku and finishing off the wine and I did make the occasional helpful contribution but Richard was in full Mrs Mop mode and was cleaning furiously and I couldn’t match his impressive productivity.  I packed my bags and tidied my bedroom as best I could in the certain knowledge that there would be a full-scale military style inspection anytime soon.  When the place had reached the required standard of cleanliness Richard made a last trip to the rubbish bins and the recycling centre and I went back to my seat on the terrace and breathed a sigh of relief.  The challenge now of course was not too make any more mess in the last two hours at the apartment.

There was some activity in the garden and some important looking people seemed to be assembling.  Ah yes the Annual General Meeting of the Neighbourhood Association.  Pete from next door was there looking all self important and the man from across the way who had challenged us on the first day and two other people who obviously represented the Las Ramblas estate management company.  I couldn’t imagine that they could possibly have had a very big agenda but the meeting went on for nearly an hour with a full inspection of the garden and furious note scribbling to record their conversation.  I wonder what momentous decisions they made?  We were unlikely to find out because they kept well away from our side of the garden and nodded and gestured as they whispered in a conspiratorial style well out of earshot of a couple of non-owners!   After a while the two visitors left and the two owners lingered in deep discussion, probably comparing the size of their patios and bragging off about property values and then they went their separate ways and both marched off in a self important manner.

The morning passed quickly after that and after Richard made a final inspection to see if he had missed anything and after satisfying himself that there was no further cleaning to be done we loaded the car, locked up and set off for the airport.  We had judged our timing to absolute perfection so there was plenty of time to stop off in San Miguel and find a supermarket for some duty free purchases and we drove into the town and found a couple of promising looking shops.  We had a nose around the first but there were no cigarettes so Richard went to find another and sauntered back to the car.  And it was then that I had that awful sinking feeling when you just know that you have forgotten something.  Where was my mobile phone?  I ransacked my pockets and my bag but I knew that it was useless of course because it was a certainty that I had left it behind in the apartment.  Oh bugger!  I gave Richard the bad news and then there was nothing for it but to go all the way back to retrieve it, a round trip journey of forty minutes that was likely to destroy our meticulous planning.  Back at the apartment, sure enough, there it was, on the dining room table where I had put it in full view so that I could be sure that I wouldn’t forget it.

This unscheduled interruption to our itinerary transformed our planned gentle drive into a frantic dash.  It was all my fault of course but Richard has enormous amounts of patience and although he was probably thinking ‘what a complete wanker!’ he was nothing less than thoroughly supportive as I drove with frazzled nerves back through San Miguel (and I didn’t think that I would be doing that again today) and then on to the motorway system and off to Alicanté hopefully before the check-in desk closed.  There were miles of road works of course and a lot of midday traffic and we had to stop for fuel but despite all this we arrived at the airport with time to spare just as Richard had confidently predicted throughout the entire journey.

The first part of check-in was relatively easy except that I nearly forgot about returning the car keys and Richard had to remind me as we stood in the queue. This involved two trips to the Hertz desk because on the first one I forgot the documentation and was sent back.  Annoying therefore that when I returned the second time and after waiting for an ice age for someone to complete what looked like a very simple clerical operation was informed that I didn’t really need it after all!

Then we were sent off to a separate office to pay the excess daylight robbery charge for our golf clubs.  There were two men in the queue making flight availability enquiries and the clerk was dealing with it at the speed of a forming stalactite and Richard could sense that this was taking my patience levels back into the red zone so with the skill of a master magician he produced two plastic beakers and a bottle of beer and this was enough to take me back down to only yellow alert status.  The two men finished their enquiry and faced with a choice of options had a bit of a debate and decided not to bother, what the….? Richard poured me some more beer.  Whilst waiting for eternity I almost made the need for the mad dash back for the mobile phone irrelevant because I decided to drop it onto the tiled floor.  It fell apart in two spectacular pieces but luckily when it was put back together again it was still working perfectly despite a couple of new scratches.

Panic over we went through to the departure gate where we finished off the beer and after a short wait at the departure gate we were on the plane, a bit of a delay to begin with, the safety lecture, take off, two-for-one gin and tonics for me and a snooze for Richard and very soon we were back in a very wet and windy Birmingham which compared most unfavourably with the weather we had left behind in Spain.  Never mind, there is always another year….!

Spain, Golf La Maquesa

I was up early again as usual and had the same performance with the patio shutters, trying my hardest to open them without making too much noise to wake Richard.  I needn’t have worried too much though because I had enough time to enjoy two cups of tea before there was any discernable movement from his bedroom.  When he did finally appear he looked rough and I was bemused by what could have caused that?  It certainly wasn’t the beer because we drank roughly the same and it couldn’t have been the food because we had exactly the same, so what could it be?  It must have been the sun because whilst I was covering myself regularly in factor fifteen Richard had been all macho in a Bruce Willis sort of way and had tried to rely on one early morning application to last the whole day!

When I was a boy sunscreen was for softies and we would regularly compete to see how much damage we could do to our bodies by turning them a vivid scarlet and then waiting for the moment that we would start to shed the damaged skin off.  After a day or two completely unprotected on the beach it was a challenge to see just how big a patch of barbequed epidermis could be removed from the shoulders in one piece and the competition was to remove a complete layer of skin in one massive peel which would leave you looking like the victim of a nuclear accident.  Most of us are much more sensible now that we are aware of the dangers of excessive sun exposure but Richard had certainly overdone it on the previous day.

I decided that we needed something uplifting for breakfast so I drove to the Mercadona and purchased some fruit and a collection of healthy looking things and I think I bought a bottle of wine as well.  At the checkout I made conversation with an ex-pat who was reading a copy of the Sun (Spanish edition) and immediately wished I hadn’t.  “Weather’s bad in England” he said, so what I thought, we are in Spain.  These people are incredible, all they want to do is rubbish the country where they made enough money to come and live somewhere else, and I didn’t want to mention it but at least in England I can drink the water without a morbid fear of dysentery and you don’t have to spend ten per cent of your household budget on sun cream to prevent premature ageing!

Back at the apartment I put the ingredients together to make the healthy breakfast and after a short while Richard was well enough to venture into the garden for another conversation with Pete who was already strutting around in that Home Guard sort of way of assumed importance.  I think I had a glass of wine and had a go at a difficult sudoku.  After a while a sauntered across but was careful not to be caught by the same nasty trick that Richard pulled last night and I was ready to take flight at the first hint of abandonment.  But the conversation was far too amusing to even contemplate retreat.  First of all he told us about the wildlife that included some incredulous tale about a three-foot rabbit! “It really took me by surprise he said” I don’t know about being surprised but it would certainly have scared the life out of me!  Three foot! That’s absolutely huge!  Next he launched into full blown exaggeration mode and explained with a completely straight face that what made this place so desirable was that it was only a ten minute walk to the beach.  Now unless Pete had discovered time travel the only way that you were going to get to the beach in ten minutes is if you are an Olympic sprint champion and I think they might find it a bit of a challenge!

So we retired inside and had a good snigger and when we were sure that Richard was fully recovered and fit for golf we set off for our mid-day tee time at the La Maquesa golf course about a twenty mile drive away.

We arrived there in good time but there was a bit of a hold up on the tee due to some confusion over start times but that gave us time enough to introduce ourselves to our playing companion for the round Bjorn who was from Iceland.  Now Bjorn was a strapping six-foot plus athlete and I got the distinct feeling that he could hit the ball an awful long way.  I shared this prediction with Richard and we decided to let him go first off the tee and yes I was right, he could hit the ball an awful long way indeed.   He smashed the ball at least three hundred yards and I followed up with a wimpy little shot of about half that distance and Richard put his ball into a gully that ran alongside the fairway.  And then he put his second shot into it as well!

This set the pattern for the afternoon’s play and Richard clearly made an early decision to treat us to his full repertoire of circus trick shots.  He began well on the second when he accurately picked out a concrete slab adjacent to a lateral ditch and the ball shot back and finished thirty yards behind where he had started.  That made Bjorn laugh and put him off his second shot and I was beginning to understand Richard’s tactics.

Well, there was no stopping him now, he put another ball in the gully and then he managed to hit just about every possible obstacle on the course including a wooden bridge, a rock wall, a tree from which the ball never emerged from and finally the trick of tricks when his ball disappeared into a swimming pool in a villa next to the fairway, luckily I don’t think there was anyone in it at the time and there were certainly no news bulletins later about anyone drowning in their pool after being struck by a golf ball on the head.  He even managed to pick me out with a precision that if he had been aiming at the green would probably have gone straight in the hole.  Best of all was his ‘hit the ball down the path’ trick that gained an impressive extra distance which he demonstrated to us on a number of occasions and which certainly had Bjorn impressed.  At the end of the round we shook hands and Richard said to Bjorn “I don’t suppose of taught you anything useful but I hope that I have entertained you”.  He had certainly achieved that you take it from me.

 It really was incredibly hot by the time we had finished so we drove straight back to Las Ramblas and spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden and in the pool and in the fridge as well of course.  Our new neighbour Pete and his wife were out for the afternoon visiting fellow owners somewhere down the coast where presumably they were comparing the size of their patios and reassuring themselves about their wonderful decision to live in sunny Spain.  We took advantage of the solitude to laze about and relax after a hot day in the sun on the golf course.

Later we did the same as every other night, although we were nearly tempted to join some fellow diners at a karaoke bar but the invite came from a young woman of about twenty and her mother of about forty told us not to bother.  We took the hint and went back to the terrace to finish the gin.

Spain, Costa Blanca

No golf today but I reverted to my natural tendencies and despite the tightly closed shutters I was awake at my usual early hour.  Richard was still fast asleep of course so I did my best to keep appropriately quiet as I crept about the apartment and made an early cup of tea.  Opening the shutters was a challenge but I was successful and I spent a leisurely time on the terrace drinking tea and watching the sun come up and flood the garden with comforting morning rays.  There was a blue sky and it was going to be another good day.  Eventually Richard emerged from his dark pit and joined me on the patio.

Our plan today was to drive to Torrevieja for breakfast and take a look at one of the Costa Blanca hotspots (or perhaps black spots depending on your point of view).  We were in no hurry so there was plenty of time for Richard to make his morning estate inspection, clean the apartment right through and take the rubbish to the recycling centre down the road.  After he done all of this we finally got away and made our way back to the grotty coast road and drove to our destination.  Once again Richard’s navigational skills were exemplary and he guided us perfectly to a car park right next to the sea front.

It has to be said straight away that this is not a place that I will be rushing to for my holidays!  There is a long concrete strip overlooked by 1970’s high-rise hotels and apartments and littered with bars with cheap plastic orange furniture and tacky pictures of the food on the menu.  I really hate that!  I know what bacon and eggs looks like and I know what spaghetti bolognese looks like (or what it should look like) and what I also know is that these pictures bear absolutely no resemblance to what you are likely to get if you are demented enough to order it.

One thing that I did like was the impressive sandcastle artists who had constructed the most amazing displays of castles, dragons and ogres and were diligently carrying out constant running repairs to prevent the things drying out and collapsing back into the sea.  Next to them on the beach were the army of British ex-pats who must now have little else to do everyday than to find their favourite pitch on the sand and wonder what else to do.  There are an enormous amount of Brits living in this part of Spain; in Torrevieja alone there are about twelve thousand and this accounts for about thirteen per cent of the entire population (the Spanish themselves are in the minority here at only forty-eight per cent) and by 2010 it is estimated that there will be one million Brits living on the Costa Blanca.

That is a lot of space freed up at home for the Eastern European migrant workers who want to come to Britain!  The sad thing of course is that they don’t want to seriously integrate and the place is awash with British pubs, British breakfasts and British newspapers and that really is a great shame.  In more glorious times the British gave the world great architecture, magnificent civic buildings and culture and now all we have to give is Burger King, Chinese Restaurants of questionable quality, fish and chips and England football shirts.

It was a bit late for breakfast by the time that we completed our walk along the seafront and when we eventually selected a restaurant it was practically lunchtime.  Luckily this place didn’t have pictures of the food and was semi-traditional place with a heritage going back to the 1950’s so we ordered tapas and beer and sat in the sun and watched the increasing beach activity.  The food was a bit disappointing and we ordered far too much but the beer was nice so we had a second just to make sure before we paid up and moved off back to the car and a trip down the coast.

We stopped again at La Zenia and dropped in once more at the beach top bar where we baked in the sun and watched the shoreline activity again.  After a cool drink we walked along the beach and Richard brazenly ogled the topless bathers in his usual indiscreet style.  Now this is very embarrassing indeed, I can remember it in Gran Canaria in 1986 and his son, Scott, will agree wholeheartedly with me, having been subjected to his dad’s zealous enthusiasm for finding lady bathers without their tops on on their visit to this very same beach only the year before.  One day he is sure to get slapped in the face but until that happens I suppose he will just go on enjoying his little beach walks in the sun.

After we had seen enough of the topless ladies we drove further south to a more refined beach resort at Dehesa de Campoamor which was a nice little place where we found a perfectly acceptable little beach bar where we sizzled for a while longer in the sun and listened in to the conversations of the British ex-pats.  Sadly conversation is severely limited and there are only three main topics; the first is about property, how much they paid for their place and how much it is worth now, second how it was the best decision that they ever made in their lives and third how they would never ever go back because Britain is such a bad place to live because of the crime.  EXCUSE ME!  At least I don’t have to worry myself stupid about security and live behind security grills and more locks and keys than you’d find in a high security prison.  Some of these people have lost all sense of reality and spend most of their time trying to convince themselves that they made the right decision when they sold up, left their heritage behind and relocated to the sun.  Personally I am not convinced.

It was time to move on and with a disappointing absence of topless bathers to watch we drove back to the apartment for an afternoon of leisure.  Unfortunately naked swimming was now out of the question because the night before some people had gate crashed our holiday and moved in to the apartment next door and when we arrived back to the garden they had taken up sunbathing positions around the pool.  We minded our own business for quite a while but eventually we were overcome with curiosity and we just had to strike up a conversation with our new neighbour.  It took a while to get beyond the three main topics of conversation but we quickly realised that here was a man who was the vice-president of the neighbourhood association and this was a role that he took very seriously indeed and he was looking forward to the Annual General Meeting which was due to take place later this week.

He was so boring that we started to look forward to it as well, because this was going to be fun!  He introduced us to the hierarchy of Spanish property ownership; first of all there are the owners and they are top of the pile, and then below them are the guests, these are the people who are using the apartments as friends of the owners and this is where we fitted in, and right at the bottom (actually some way at the bottom) are the renters, who are common people who can’t afford overseas property investments and don’t have friends who can either.

It was at this time that Richard played a despicable trick on me.  He was engaged in conversation with Pete and anxious to get away before his brain melted with tedium strain he seized the moment brilliantly when I wandered up to join in and he took the opportunity to disappear inside and back to the fridge bar.  It took me at least fifteen minutes to get away myself after being subjected to a barrage of boasting and a conversation about optimistic Spanish property valuations.

After that we did much the same as on the previous nights; went to Villamartin where we went to the same restaurant and enjoyed another hearty meal and then went back to the apartment for late night drinks, reflection on the day past and optimism about tomorrow’s round of golf.

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More stories about Spain:

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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Ten things I didn’t know about Spain

Spain consists of a number of autonomous communities established in accordance to the second article of the Spanish Constitution which recognises the rights of regions and nationalities to self-government whilst also acknowledging the ‘indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation’.  Currently, Spain comprises seventeen autonomous communities and two autonomous cities, both of which are on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa.  As a highly decentralised state Spain has possibly the most modern political and territorial arrangements in Western European.   Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia are designated historic nationalities and Andalusia, although not a nationality, also has preferential status, the remaining are regional Provinces without nationality.

Read the full list…

In search of the real Spain

With an area of just over five hundred thousand square kilometers Spain is the second largest country in Western Europe after France and with an average altitude of six hundred and fifty metres it is second highest country in Europe after Switzerland.  That is a lot of country to try and see and visit and with so many northern European ex-pats living down the eastern coastal strip then the chances of experiencing the real Spain was always going to be difficult to achieve in this part of the country.  And so it was.

Read the full story…

Every Picture Tells a Story – Benidorm c1960

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain…. Roads, the radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”                                                                                                                                           Norman Lewis –  ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, 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 the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

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.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   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 Vickers Vanguard airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

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.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.  After paying the rent on the first floor Catford apartment Grandad used to spend most of the rest of his wages on Embassy cigarettes, Watney’s Red Barrel and in the Bookies so perhaps he had a secret source of income?  He does look like a bit of a gangland boss in some of these pictures or perhaps he had a good system and had done rather well on the horses.

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.  Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.

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

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

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

During the day there wasn’t a great deal to do except to visit the beaches and spend endless pointless hours sunbathing.  Benidorm is famous for its two main beaches which stretch for four kilometres all along the bay.  The city enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain because it actually faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch out either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, the sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long.

Read the full story…

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

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

In 1976 I travelled to Europe for the first time to Sorrento in Italy with my dad who obligingly stepped in at the last moment following a bit of romantic trouble when just before departure my girlfriend went off with the head reporter from the local newspaper (Rugby Advertiser).  Very soon after that we patched things up and in October the following year I went to Spain with my (now) fiancée, Linda.  We could have gone practically anywhere we liked, so long as it was within our restricted budget of course, but we choose to go to Benidorm on the Costa Blanca for two whole weeks and we selected the Don Juan hotel on the Avenida del Mediterráneo, just behind the Levante beach because Linda had been there some time before with her parents and had liked it.

Read the full story…

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