Exploding the myths of Benidorm

Benidorm, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, is Europe’s most popular holiday destination but has suffered for decades at the hands of journalists repeating the same old stories to disparage the resort. The fact is that most of these are simply false.

Benidorm has to import sand from Morocco to maintain its beaches. This little gem originated when a tourist representative played a prank on his clients while they were traveling on the coach that was taking them from Alicante airport to their hotel in Benidorm in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, his comment went down in history. media. The resort’s seven kilometers of silky soft sand is completely natural, and the city actually supplies high-quality sand to several of the local resorts. Benidorm spends more on keeping its beaches clean than most cities on all its streets.

Benidorm was a fishing village before the tourist boom.This is perhaps the pearl of all bad dates and is still used regularly. Benidorm was never a fishing port, the port is too shallow. But the history of the spa has always been linked to the sea. It provided the most skilled crews in the entire Mediterranean for the almadraba, the complex method with which tuna have been fished since Phoenician times. It was also the source for many of the Spanish merchant fleet captains and crew, whose experience dealing with many nationalities during their worldwide travels served them well when the world turned back and began to come to their shore.

Benidorm are wall to wall high rise apartments. Pedro Zaragoza Orts, the young mayor of Benidorm at the time, drew up the General Planning Plan in 1954 which ensured, by means of a complex constructive formula, that each building would have a “leisure” area, mainly gardens and swimming pools, guaranteeing a future free of the excesses of constructive overcrowding seen in other areas of Spain. It is the only city in Spain that still maintains this rigid rule, and if you climb to the top of Sierra Helada, the promontory at the end of Rincón de Loix, you get an impressive view of how green the city is and how close it is to the moutains.

In Benidorm, with its population of… millions of Britons, you hardly hear a Spanish accent. Put the figure you want on the dotted line because I have seen that almost all numbers between one million and three million are used. There are actually 463,704 permanent resident expats of all nationalities in total covering the entire Costa Blanca, a stretch of coastline that covers more than 140 kilometres. Benidorm itself has very few permanent expat residents; they tend to congregate in other coastal towns. Altea is predominantly Dutch, Calpe German and Torrevieja British. When the seaside resort began its phenomenal boom during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, it attracted workers from all over Spain, many of whom established small regional communities in the city. It is, and has always been, the great center of inland tourism (at the beginning of the 20th century it was known as Madrid’s beach due to the number of people from Madrid who spent their holidays there – and still do), so far from never hear a Spanish accent, you can hear practically all the accents, dialects and languages ​​of Spain and Latin America.