BENIDORM, Spain (dpa) – It is no Las Vegas and certainly no place of pilgrimage. Yet five million visitors throng here each year.
No other place in Europe, and certainly no small town of just 50,000 residents, attracts as many tourists as the Spanish seaside resort of Benidorm.And this although it is anything but chic to be seen at this tourist attraction on the Costa Brava.Quite the opposite. The resort north of Alicante has a poor reputation. For many Benidorm, with its giant high-rise tourist hotels, is a prime example of mass tourism gone mad.Yet can five million people be wrong? Even in the off-peak month of December the seaside town is far from dead. Tourists mill along the beach front enjoying the warm winter sun. Some even brave a dip in the sea.“We don’t really recognize the seasons any more,” said tourist board director Maria Jose Montiel. “Most hotels don’t close now in the winter. Our season is all the year around.”Curiously, although Benidorm is one of the most visited tourist resorts in the world, this Manhattan-on-sea barely gets a decent mention in travel guides to Spain.It seems as though those people who visit Benidorm every year should really have a guilty conscience about it.The Lonely Planet travel guide says Benidorm stands for everything that is bad about mass tourism. Can it really be as awful? it asks, before replying, “Save the trip. It’s much worse than you can imagine.”Anyone looking for an idyllic holiday village will definitely be disappointed. It was, in fact, a pretty fishing village up until the 1950s. And then legend has it that a fairy came one day to tell the fishermen: “Leave your trawlers, buy bricks and cement. The beach and the sun will do the rest.”It was the start of the building boom. Hotels sprung up out of the ground on both the large beaches to the east and west of the village centre. From a distance the skyline of hotel tower blocks in the middle of a dry and barren countryside looks a bit like Las Vegas.The hotel high-rises of concrete and glass may look ugly but they have their advantages, according to the local tourist board.Montiel said: “There is a lot of room between the individual tower blocks, which allows space for greenery. The area fronting the sea has not been built up so there is a sea view from even the hotels in the second and third rows.”Town planner Jose Miguel Iribas compares Benidorm to a large bottle of Coca-Cola.“From this are drinking snobs and hooligans, fashionable Italians and hefty Germans, elegant French and liberal Dutch, children and parents – and sometimes grandmother too,” he said.The winter months see mainly elderly visitors from all over Spain come to relatively warm Benidorm. In the summer the picture is different. The town is taken over by the young who have turned Benidorm into one of the disco attractions of the Mediterranean.Fifty-three per cent of the visitors are British, followed by the Belgians (7.2 per cent) and the Dutch (4.5 per cent). The Germans, who are well represented in other Mediterranean resorts, make up only 1 to 2 per cent of the tourists.“We have no explanation why so few Germans come,” said the tourist board chief.In the future Benidorm would like to attract more families and independent visitors as opposed to package tourists. The town hopes the new theme park Terra Mitica which opened last summer and which is claimed to be the largest leisure park of its kind in Europe will help attract families.The park, lying in the hills above the town, mixes modern funfair attractions with elements of classic Mediterranean culture from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.Thus a ghost train is hidden in the labyrinth of the minotaurus while Europe’s largest wooden big dipper weaves its way through a Roman fortress.
