Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Eventually, however, Gil was banned from public office. His reaction was to step back into the shadows and appoint others to represent him. One of these, Julián Muñoz, eventually rebelled. Muñoz had ambitions to become a Jesús Gil himself. He was ousted in a town hall rebellion fixed by Gil in which the political parties of those involved seemed to have nothing to do with the way they voted. Some claimed that a rogue British financier, who fled London in the 1970s and made millions on Marbella real estate, was behind it all.

  One hot summer’s night, I turned on the television set to find Gil and Muñoz involved in their final showdown. This was not being conducted on a politics or news programme but on Salsa Rosa. This late-night TV show is normally devoted, loudly and argumentatively, to updating its viewers on the sex lives, affairs of the heart, broken friendships and plastic surgery of second-rate celebrities. Spain has no muck-raking tabloid press. There is no equivalent to Britain’s Sun or Germany’s Bild. But there are at least half a dozen of these shows on Spanish television. A similar number of so-called prensa rosa, or ‘pink press’, magazines are for sale on the news-stands. Here the cheque-book confessions of those famous for being famous are gone over in minute and, often, imaginary detail amid shouted bouts of accusation and counter-accusation. All the so-called ‘journalists’ on this particular programme really wanted to know was whether the reason for Gil’s decision to oust Muñoz had been that he could not stand his girlfriend, the folkloric singer and gay icon Isabel Pantoja. She had previously been known as ‘the widow of Spain’ after her former husband, the matador Paquirri, was gored to death by a fighting bull. But the battle soon got nastier than that. ‘You are a bandido,’ shouted Gil. ‘You are a liar and cheat,’ spat Muñoz. ‘They are both probably right,’ commented El Mundo newspaper the next morning.

  Gil’s Marbella is often held up as an example of the perfection of a system of corruption that is a temptation to all Spanish town halls. Most land needs to be reclassified from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ before it can be built on. The power to do that rests with the town hall, which raises a tax on the new buildings and sells licences. Much building land is, anyway, owned by town halls themselves. They are now so dependent on income gained from construction that, if they stopped building, some would lose between fifty and sixty per cent of their income. There may also be a second, underhand tax. This is the one that must be paid to the mayor, the councillor in charge of urban planning, their political party, their pet project, their wife, children, testaferro (front man) or whoever. Nobody can say, for sure, how often this tax is raised. Suspicious Spaniards assume it to be commonplace. If that is really so, then an unbreakable cycle is formed. The personal and political interests of both the developer and the politician meet, as do the spending habits (and funding) of the town hall. All they need to do is keep on building.

  Stand on the busy beachfront in Marbella, or anywhere along the Costa del Sol, and this soon becomes apparent. The beachside development is moving rapidly up the hills, devouring everything in its path as the chain of cement joins up down the coast. Year after year I have watched the growth and seen the last few islands of green along the coast disappear. Towns have been joined together, like some giant dot-to-dot drawing, by lines of apartment blocks. Where the beach is already blocked, there has been a steady march inland.

  The voices of Spain’s environmentalists, meanwhile, are drowned out by the sound of cement mixers and pile-drivers. Golf courses have become the latest drain on already scarce water resources. Some eighty-nine of these are projected along the costas over the next five years. Each will consume the water equivalent of a town of twelve thousand people, according to the environmentalists.

  The building boom is fuelled, in part, by the proceeds of the drug trade with nearby Morocco and, further afield, with Colombia. A recent 250-million-euro police operation against money-laundering saw entire urbanizaciones confiscated by the courts.

  The result of the boom is a brand new Mediterranean megalopolis, a single stretch of building extending down the coast for a hundred miles, from Nerja in the east to Sotogrande in the west. Although 1.2 million people formally live on the Costa del Sol, there are actually believed to be some 3 million residents. Many are foreigners with few interests beyond their own house, the golf course and a handful of friends of the same nationality. There is something very American about this car-dependent ribbon of growth as it defies you, like a small Los Angeles, to discover its centre. If it continues adding, as it currently does, almost fifty thousand houses and apartments a year, it will double its population once more in fifteen to twenty years. There are even predictions that the Costa del Sol megalopolis will, eventually, become Spain’s largest city. Unfortunately, as the traffic jams show, it is not something that has been planned for.

  Jesús Gil is by no means the only corrupt politician to have disgraced these climes. The clearest proof of a link between drug money, politics and costas construction came when the Socialist mayor of Estepona, Antonio Caba, was sentenced to five years in jail for helping launder the money of a Turkish heroin-trafficking syndicate. Caba, elected on the promise of cleaning up the alleged corruption of a previous mayor, had, in his private lawyer’s practice, helped Turkish drug smuggler Levent Ucler launder more than one million pounds through local real estate. Ucler, at the time, was also under investigation for the murder of his own wife. Little surprise, then, that the voters of Estepona, at one stage, turned to Jesus Gil’s GIL party.

  Figures for the amount of black cash being laundered in the costas’ on-off construction booms are impossible to calculate. It includes not just ‘white’ cocaine and hashish money, but also the ‘grey’ money of small European businessmen who buy houses with cash never declared to their own tax authorities. It would be nice to think that all this money, wherever it came from, trickled down to the people of the Costa del Sol. But it circulates, instead, in the upper spheres of developers, construction magnates and the comparatively rich, northern European buyers. ‘One wonders how a province with the highest unemployment rates and one of the lowest incomes per capita in the country can have the highest rate of business societies per 1,000 inhabitants and a growth of 1,800 per cent in the construction of new private housing in the last five years,’ a recent university study asked out loud. The study, produced by a brave few individuals at Málaga University’s criminology institute, pointed out that the costas were on a ladder of corruption. If nothing was done, they warned, it could lead to the creation of an established mafia economy.

  Their report was, however, greeted with almost total silence. Nothing has been done to end the dependency of town halls on builders and, ultimately, on their clients – the tourists. Indeed, questioning tourism in any way at all is met with almost total incomprehension. To ask a Costa del Sol politician whether they approve or disapprove of tourism and construction is to ask a villager in the sierras of nearby Jaén or Córdoba whether they approve or disapprove of olive trees.

  At the provincial police headquarters in Málaga I went to see Chief Inspector Fernando Vives, the man who had been searching Francisco Calero’s flat when he hurled himself from the rooftop. Vives headed a team of just eight police officers whose job it was to tackle financial crime on the Costa del Sol. ‘It is like fighting an army of elephants with a few ants,’ he admitted. Some major money-laundering busts since we met suggest either that his ants are working remarkably hard, or that their numbers have been boosted. The impression remains, however, that only the tip of the iceberg has been dealt with.

  Vives was a sensitive cop. ‘All you can see along the coast are cranes and more cranes. A large part of that money comes from illegal earnings,’ he says. ‘The Costa’s geography – its hills and woodlands – are being destroyed. Nobody imagined it would be like this.’

  Vives said the hashish traffic from Morocco alone was at about 350 tonnes a year. The presence of Gibraltar, with twice as many offshore companies as its 29,000 residents, had helped create the opp
ortunities for crime and corruption. The same routes, and the same international gangs, are increasingly turning to cocaine.

  The problem is made worse by British and other expatriate residents. Most cannot be bothered to register as citizens of their new home towns, robbing the area of other funds awarded on the basis of how many people live there. Some 300,000 Britons are estimated to live here. That makes this Britain’s fourteenth-largest ‘city’, larger than, for example, Cardiff, Belfast, Southampton or Bradford. However, fewer than one in ten British residents are registered. Costa corruption is as much the result of those who come here, enjoy the Spanish weather and hospitality but refuse to accept any responsibility for the place they live in, as it is of crooked politicians and construction companies.

  The Costa traffic jam seemed so interminable, that I decided to give up on my attempt to reach Málaga on the coastal road. I turned around. I eventually joined, instead, an even worse jam on the motorway that has been sliced through the hills a couple of miles inland. First, however, I decided to try to find a shortcut through one of the urbanizaciones whose often gated and guarded entrances are strung along this road. It was a baffling experience. I recognised little that was Spanish here, except the gardens overflowing with bougainvillea and oleander. The array of architectural styles on display was bewildering. There were Moorish palaces, huge great Basque caserios, Mexican haciendas, rows of nondescript three-storey terraced hutches, gleaming glass and stainless steel modern apartment blocks, low-slung bungalows and wood-built houses straight out of the Swedish forests or the Canadian prairie. American-style condominiums, and golf courses, were sprouting up in the surrounding countryside. This, one visiting American journalist observed, was a place ‘whose gaudy architecture makes Beverly Hills look staid’.

  I felt lost. It was not just because I could not find a way back out of this maze – which turned out to have only one entrance, preventing any through road spoiling the residents’ peace while making no contribution to unsnarling the chaos on the coastal road. Eventually, I decided that I was not in Spain any more. This was really the outer suburbs of a coastal city in Florida, Australia or any of the white-dominated suburbs along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. It was, essentially, a new place. It had been invented out of nothing and answered to nothing more than its residents’ desire to live a life of leisure.

  Spain is a country of small, tightly packed towns, cities and villages. Spaniards like to live piled up on top of one another. Their natural meeting place is the crowded street, the busy bar or the plaza. It is a life of close physical contact, of loud, sociable bustle. Benidorm, at least, has that. But here the only place people can be seen, tanned and blonde, is in their cars, as they head for the tennis club, the golf course or the out-of-town shopping centre, the new Spanish malls. Even the narrow beach, although busy, seems to be a minority interest. Its role has been replaced by tens of thousands of swimming pools – adding to growing problems with water.

  This, however, is the new model for Spanish tourism, and not just on the Costa del Sol. Package tourism, the gold mine on which Benidorm was founded, is giving way to budget airlines and on-line booking of private villas. The money that changes hands often does not even come to Spain or pay a tax to help build the roads or water recycling plants. The urbanizaciones, some expensive, some full of hurriedly put up, shoddy ‘villas’, are sprouting up from Majorca to Marbella, from Torremolinos to Torrevieja. Many are ghost towns in winter, their restaurants and shops closed and their houses barred up.

  In Benidorm, the editor of the English-language daily newspaper, the Costa Blanca News, told me that a friend of his had gone house-hunting to a new urbanización in a nearby town. He saw a man working in his garden and stopped to talk to him. The man turned out to be English. ‘Are there many foreigners here, then?’ the friend asked. ‘No, not really. There is one Norwegian, but the rest of us are British,’ came the answer. It had not occurred to him that British, in Spain, meant foreign.

  I find the package holiday tourist at Benidorm, or the drunken 18–30 revellers battling their way up and down the streets of Ibiza’s San Antonio district easier to understand than these new, semi-permanent immigrants to the costas. I know package holidaymakers are here for the fun, for cheap booze, to watch their kids play with buckets and spades and to shed their normal skin for a while or, at least, to change its colour. They seek a temporary transformation, a chance to forget the humdrum of their normal lives.

  But the residents of the urbanizaciones feel to me like a different tribe, as strange as the Visigoths, the Moors or the Vandals must have been when they first arrived on the Iberian peninsula. I realise there is an element of possessiveness, even arrogance, in this. Having, however, made repeated attempts, and repeated failures, at understanding this tribe, I eventually turned to someone better equipped for interpreting the social structures, belief systems and rituals of other peoples – an anthropologist.

  It was years since I had read an anthropology book, so I was excited to get my hands on Karen O’Reilly’s The British on the Costa Del Sol. O’Reilly had followed the great traditions of Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Evans-Pritchard and Pitt-Rivers in immersing herself in the world of her strange and exotic subject. This was to be ‘ethnographic research involving long-term participant observation’. But, instead of choosing to live amongst the Trobriand Islanders, the Nuer of the Sudan or the natives of Papua New Guinea, she had disguised herself as an ex-pat on the Costa del Sol. Where others had mud huts, canoes and pig-swapping ceremonies as their raw material, O’Reilly had the Royal British Legion, timeshare touts and the Anglican church coffee mornings in Fuengirola. Her hardships included sitting through an Old Time Music-Hall sing-along and hearing people insist that the ten-year-olds who murdered two-year-old Jamie Bulger should, themselves, be stoned to death.

  Her research turned out to be depressing. The Brits came to Spain to get away from a country they saw as rotten with crime, immigration, broken communities and a failing health service. They fooled themselves that they were living a Spanish lifestyle, but spoke little or no Spanish and remained in their ghettoes. Some, after more than a decade, spoke fewer than twenty words of Spanish. ‘They … retain the Little Englandism, the isolationist tendencies, the island mentality, the “natural” racism or nationalism of Great Britain, while denying that they do,’ she concluded. They were, she decided, ‘betwixt and between’. She might have said ‘neither here, nor there’.

  Where the urbanizaciones are not graveyards in the winter, it is often because those living there are, themselves, close to the grave. Again, Spain has become America or, at least, Florida. It is the last refuge of a greying population, come to stretch their northern European pensions, and their final years, in the sunshine and supermarkets of the costas. In some places they now out number the local population. Whereas those who install themselves in France’s Dordogne or Italy’s Tuscany often do so in a spirit of cultural inquisitiveness, these people seem to have been attracted only by sunshine.

  There are noble exceptions. Spain’s first hospice, built outside Málaga, is a tribute to its British founder. Torrevieja football club has a loyal British following, ‘the Torry army’. It is almost impossible, however, to find a place where, as a group, the new colonisers have provided anything more than money.

  In a last-gasp attempt to find some new immigrants who were actually involved in the place they lived, I went to Teulada, a small town just a few miles from the coast, half an hour’s drive north of Benidorm. As I headed for the town hall, I passed a shop front that boldly proclaimed: ‘Funeraria, Undertakers, Bestattungsin-stitut’. I popped in. These days, owner Pepe Vallés explained to me, people in Teulada and its coastal hamlet, Moraira, die in at least three languages. Shipping corpses home to Britain, Germany and the rest of Europe now accounted for a third of this happy undertaker’s income. ‘Most are already quite elderly when they get here,’ he said. ‘Generally they want to be cremated.’ It was, he
explained, the cheapest option.

  In Teulada, more than a third of the 6,000 names on the electoral register are foreign, most of them British. This will soon rise to more than half. As a result, a community whose history can be traced back before the thirteenth-century Christian kings snatched it from the Moors must now learn to cope with a new – some say devastating – sort of conquest. For here, the ex-pat community, tired of their villas overlooking the sea at Moraira being placed at the bottom of the municipal list of priorities, have organised themselves politically. They have, in effect, won control of the town hall.

  The villa owners had brought with them a thoroughly British, ‘not in my backyard’ approach to development. As soon as their own villas were completed, they did not want any more to go up, spoiling the view or the gentle countryside, neatly laid out with low vines, running down to the sea. They had put a massive brake on further development, electing a Spanish mayor who knew his job was to say ‘No!’ to the succulent proposals put his way by developers. The mayor held separate meetings for them in English, German and French.

  Teulada immigrants were obviously getting involved. That, however, did not please everyone. I found a local town councillor, Vicente Marzal, looking depressed. He had just formed the People for Teulada Party to fight the next elections on what could only be described as an anti-immigrant ticket. His complaints were the familiar stuff of changing European communities from Bradford to Marseille. ‘People call me racist, but I ask the foreigners whether they would like it if a Turk was running the town hall where they come from and most agree with me,’ Marzal said. ‘Very few of them speak Spanish, let alone our dialect of Valencian. I don’t understand it; they live with us but don’t want to speak our language. They don’t do anything to integrate.’