Ghosts of Spain Read online

Tárbena was once a Moorish village whose inhabitants, given no other option except exile from their home of six hundred years, became moriscos – nominally Christian converts – after the Reconquista. Even that, however, did not save them. In 1609, Felipe III ordered the moriscos out of Spain. Today’s Tarbeneros are descendants of the seventeen families imported from the island of Majorca to replace them. They still make the same, soft, paprika-flavoured sobrasada sausages of the Majorcans and speak a peculiar dialect of Catalan, which is mainly Valencian, but is still coloured by words of Majorcan.

  My children’s great-grandfather, Salvador Ripoll Moncho, was one of many emigrants who left this stretch of the Mediterranean in 1916. He headed to the Americas, building a life for himself in New York and then in his wife’s country, Panama. He returned to live out his retirement and, finally, die here in La Marina.

  He was buried in the cemetery at Tárbena, alongside his brothers and sisters and the generations of Ripolls and Monchos who had eked out a living from the almonds, the oranges, the lemon trees and the loquats of these austere and desiccated hills. It was from this graveyard, during a night-time stroll, that I first set eyes on Benidorm. This was the early 1990s so the Hotel Bali was still just a hole in the ground. But, there below me in the distance, I could make out the glistening, glaring lights of what one Spanish writer refers to as ‘the great touropolis’. Its sudden appearance seemed to me to make a dramatic and violent intrusion on Tárbena’s otherwise undisturbed, mountain-top calm.

  Few in Tárbena would have agreed with me. For Salvador Ripoll Moncho’s relatives who still live there, and for those who moved down the hill and into the bright lights, Benidorm is a modern marvel.

  There is no better symbol of that Benidorm miracle, with all its glaring faults, than the Hotel Bali. Fifty-two floors, 186 metres high, the Bali is at its most spectacular at night, and from a distance. Then it looks like a massive, silver knife, projecting beams of light up into the clouds. By day, close up, it is a dull, grey, concrete and glass giant. ‘We kept waiting for them to paint it,’ quipped a drinker at one of the Union flag-bedecked, Sky TV and all-day-British-breakfast bars – with names like the Pheasant Plucker, the Jolly Sailor and The Bridewell – that surround it, when I visited.

  The building of the Bali was an epic affair. It was put up gradually over fourteen years by a group of local hotel owners who poured their annual profits into it. No loans were taken. The Bali was built on the back of a boom. On good years it rose steadily upwards. On excellent ones it went still faster. That alone made it, by the standards of the construction industry, one of the strangest buildings to have gone up in Europe in recent decades. It is an accurate symbol of modern Benidorm. The Bali is ambitious but pragmatic, big but boring, great but gruesome. It is, in short, what it, and Benidorm, was designed to be – a vast container for package tourism. And Benidorm is to package tourism what Las Vegas is to gambling – the undisputed capital of the world.

  As you draw closer to the town from the south, the Bali is joined in the distance by an army of skinny skyscrapers. They look like a hundred matchsticks standing on end. Some are so thin and tall that one wonders whether a strong gust of wind might not blow them down. A typhoon that blew through this plantation of cement poles might, one imagines, leave it looking like a forest after a violent storm, the buildings uprooted and lying on the floor in a jumble, like so many spillikins or jackstraws.

  It is also, however, the high-rise capital of southern Europe. Neither Paris, nor Milan, Rome, Athens, Barcelona or Madrid can compete with its 330 high-rises. No wonder locals have dubbed it, in deference to New York, BeniYork. In Europe as a whole it is out-skyscraped only by Frankfurt, Moscow and Greater London. Paris and London are the only places in Europe with more hotel rooms than Benidorm, which has some 38,000. If Spain is a global superpower in tourism – and it is – then Benidorm is the towering symbol of that status.

  Staying in the Bali the night after it had opened, I found myself riding up and down its glass exterior lift, drawn to the nosy-parker view of the front rooms of apartments in a dozen other skyscrapers. The lifts here are, on their own, a reminder that modern Benidorm exists for, and because of, foreigners. ‘Stand away from the doors when closing,’ the lift ordered me, in an English voice which, in my memory at least, had a light Manchester accent. ‘Las puertas están cerrando,’ it repeated – the Spanish vowels mashed flat by the very same English voice. A designer who pitched to work on the lay-out of bedrooms told me he was asked to think of ‘an English butcher’s wife’ when coming up with ideas.

  Fifty years ago, this was a modest beach-side village, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees. My children’s grandmother first came here, on the way to visit her father’s village, in the 1950s. She found a three-mile-long, double crescent of almost virgin golden sand and rolling dunes. In those days, the village sat on and around a rocky outcrop that divided the two beaches, Poniente and Levante. Small fishing boats, the tarrafes, hung with four large lanterns each to attract fish at night, bobbed in the water or lay drawn-up on the sand. The men often spent months away from home, as sailors, officers or captains on coastal steamers and transatlantic ships or working the almadraba, the complicated maze of nets laid out to trap tuna fish. The system of diverting the fish into a small killing zone, the ‘cop’, where they could be killed with iron hooks and harpoons, was perfected under the Moors. Archaeological evidence was once found here of pre-Roman jars for storing the valuable oil in which tuna was conserved. The Iberian settlement where the jars were found has now, inevitably, been buried under concrete. Benidorm, like Spain, would rather look forwards than back. A few archaeological remains were hardly going to survive the gold-rush fever of tourism.

  The almadraba was a massive, complex task, a piece of maritime engineering with more than 1,000 kilometres of rope, netting and cables, fixed by hundreds of anchors, rings and gates, used to create a single maze covering some six square kilometres of sea. The men of Benidorm were almadraba experts. They would be called for from as far away as Tunisia and Sicily to lay the nets as the fish migrated south in the early summer and returned north in the autumn. The women, meanwhile, tended the olives, the almonds, the lemons, oranges and carobs.

  Benidorm attracted relatively few visitors. In 1950 there were four or five small fondas, pensiones and hotels for the odd commercial traveller or for families from Madrid or Barcelona who came to spend the summer. A handful of holiday villas belonged to wealthy families from Valencia, Alcoy and Madrid.

  ‘We didn’t call it “turismo” back then, we called it “veraneo”, summering. We got the word “tourism” later, from the Swiss,’ the man who was mayor in the 1950s, Pedro Zaragoza Orts, told me when I visited him on his eighty-first birthday in Benidorm.

  Zaragoza is the father of modern Benidorm. When I met him, this largely unreconstructed Francoist was still fighting fit and a passionate defender of what had happened to his village. To find him, I had needed to negotiate my way through the town centre’s bustling, overcrowded streets, following a man dressed in a flowing, spangled blue cape and glittery top hat. The man was steering a perilous-looking vehicle from a driver’s seat perched on top of a ladder some fifteen feet above the wheels. A loudspeaker blasted music and publicity for a nearby water park.

  Zaragoza’s office was tucked at the back of a nondescript, modern arcade, in the small, chaotic town centre. ‘I was born here,’ he said, pointing to one corner of the office. ‘My mother died there ten days afterwards,’ he added, indicating another corner. He was pointing to places that, like most of old Benidorm, no longer existed. His old home had been knocked down long ago to build this drab, functional block and, one assumes, make some money for his family.

  Zaragoza’s appointment as mayor had little to do with democracy and everything to do with the Franco regime. A certificate showing his appointment as provincial head of Franco’s Movimiento Nacional sits on the
office wall where, when I went to see him, he still did a bit of lawyering.

  What Zaragoza has never been, however, is conservative. He is proud of the Moorish and Jewish blood that, he believes, must run somewhere in his veins. He has an almost Messianic view of tourism as a way of promoting understanding between peoples and cultures.

  He is also one of the few Spaniards alive to have had an excommunication process started against him. The blame for that lies with the bikini. ‘Without asking permission from anyone, I signed a municipal order authorising the wearing of bikinis,’ he explained. ‘So the archbishop started an excommunication process. In those days, excommunication was a form of civil death. It meant you could not take entry exams for official jobs, nor become a university student. You became a leper in society.’

  This was in 1959, when the first fruits of his dream that Benidorm might become a tourist resort were beginning to ripen. Tall, blonde northern Europeans were arriving in their caravans or off the first package holiday flights to Valencia airport. To the dismay of a clergy which already considered beaches a moral danger to the nation, they also wore the, then voluminous, two-piece swimsuits known as bikinis. The Civil Guard would sometimes order them to cover up, especially if a bikini was spotted off the beach. An English woman was fined for slapping a police officer who insisted she put a shirt on.

  Zaragoza’s friends in high places turned their backs on him when he took on the all-powerful Church. Two government ministers backed the excommunication campaign. So, one day, he got up at 4 a.m., stuffed some newspaper down his shirt to keep out the cold and got on his Vespa. He rode it for the nine hours it took to get to Madrid and went to see Franco.

  ‘He was the only one who helped me. He asked me how I had come, whether by train or airplane, and I said no, on a Vespa. That surprised him,’ Zaragoza explained. ‘He told me to go back to Benidorm. Eight days later his wife appeared with the Minister of Governance and his wife. They reconfirmed my appointment as mayor, gave me an insignia to wear on my jacket so that I could enter El Pardo (Franco’s Madrid palace) whenever I wanted and stayed for four or five days. After that, Franco’s wife, Carmen Polo, would come in the spring or the autumn. She would stay eight days, or fifteen days, in my house,’ he said. The Caudillo, or at least his wife, became Benidorm’s leading patron.

  The archbishop got the message. The excommunication process was dropped. The bikini stayed. Some see this, at least symbolically, as a defining moment in recent Spanish history. It marked the beginning of a timid sexual revolution and helped take the Catholicism out of National Catholicism. The tourists, more importantly, had the power to outface the Church. They brought not just money, but the seeds of change. They also brought the fresh air of democracy. There was no turning back.

  General Franco was there at the key moment. Without the bikini there, quite possibly, would have been no modern Benidorm and, in fact, precious little tourism at all. At this stage, had Spain not welcomed it, the nascent package tourism could easily have put its roots down elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

  Bikinis would eventually make it past cinema censors in 1964. By 1979, with Franco less than four years in the grave, Spain’s beaches – and Spanish women – had gone topless. Today even some municipal swimming pools have nudist zones.

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

  Franco, Zaragoza claimed, understood tourism. He would grill him on his ideas, give him the go-ahead, and then send him packing back to Benidorm. Perhaps the generalísimo was conscious that Spain’s previous, though somewhat more benign, dictator – General Miguel Primo de Rivera, father of the Falange founder – had also done his bit for tourism by founding the state chain of Parador hotels, in converted monasteries and castles, in 1928.

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

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

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

  Franco’s decision to back Zaragoza and his bikinis came at a time when he was under increasing pressure to ease the iron grip of both Church and State. That pressure would see some relatively liberal advances, including a relaxing of censorship, during the 1960s – though Franco would later regret much of the latter.

  We do not know whether he ever regretted letting the bikini loose. Years later the revolution that started in Benidorm was still inspiring ecclesiastical tub-thumping. Father Aparicio Pellín put it this way in his 1970 tome The Problems of Youth: ‘Oh! If they erected a black cross on the beach for every mortal sin committed there, the beach would have more crosses than grains of sand!’

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

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

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

  Spain is a tourism superpower. It attracts 53 million foreign visitors a year (16 million of them British and 2.3 million of them Dutch). One in twenty come to Benidorm or the rest of the Costa Blanca. More than 11 per cent of Spain’s economy runs off tourism. Some of the credit for that has to go to the old dictator. The same families who turned small plots of beachside farming land into hotels in Majorca, the Costa Brava or th
e Costa del Sol are now building or running resorts from Cuba and Santo Domingo to Jamaica, Bulgaria and Tunisia.

  In 1950, still in his twenties, Zaragoza began to draw broad boulevards on the map where only olive and almond trees stood. Benidorm, like much of this coast from Valencia south, had an ancient agricultural watering system inherited from the Moors. But it had no running, domestic water supply. Drinking water was sold by a man with a mule that dragged a huge cask on wheels. Water wheels were still being used to move water in the fields. Waste was carried out of people’s houses in buckets and tipped into the sea or onto the earth. ‘We asked ourselves what we had. The answer was not agriculture. It was too dry here. But we had the climate, we had our own, liberal temperament – the result of years of sailing the oceans – and we had the sand on the beach,’ he explained. ‘It had to be tourism.’ Little Benidorm – as neighbouring towns like Alcudia or Denia with Greek or Roman pasts like to remind them – did not even have any significant history to sell. One of Zaragoza’s first jobs, indeed, was to invent a town shield. Then he got on with the task of inventing what is, in effect, a new town.

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