City guide: Benidorm
Forget the cliches, the beautiful skyscrapers of Benidorm show this Spanish resort is leading the pack in urban development.
From the 40th floor of the Hotel Bali you could be in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur.
Skyscrapers, glistening gold in the twilight, hug the city’s twin bays, their occupants switching on the lights as day turns to night.
But we’re not in Hong Kong (or indeed any other megacity). Surprisingly we’re in Spain, specifically, the coastal resort of Benidorm. Yes, Benidorm.
The town may be a byword for the sort of tourism that gets British middle-class people all superior and sniffy but we’re not here to sneer, but to admire one of the most beautiful, best planned towns in Europe.
“He permitted the wearing of bikinis on the beach: a hugely controversial move”
“Benidorm is what we call a ‘slow city’,” says Municipal Architect, Luis Camarasa, who’s overseen its development for 35 years. “We look to the future and see how can we have as little environmental impact as possible.”
Camarasa, who operates from Benidorm’s new, and very stylish, town hall (which he designed), is faithfully carrying on the work of the man who invented modern Benidorm – and indeed the idea of the mass-market Mediterranean resort – Pedro Zaragoza Orts.
Brought up in Benidorm when it was just a tuna-fishing village, Zaragoza – after stints working in a Madrid railway depot and a phosphate mine, where he rose to become a manager – worked in a local bank before being appointed mayor in 1950.
He’d already organised the piping of water to the resort, when in 1952, he permitted the wearing of bikinis on the beach: a hugely controversial move. This caused the outraged local bishop to threaten him with excommunication for corrupting public morals.
“ If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts”
Only the intervention of Spanish leader General Franco – who Zaragoza rode to see on a scooter – saved his soul. From then on, Benidorm became the resort of choice for north Europeans in search of sun, sea and various other pleasures beginning with ‘s’.
Zaragoza, however, had more on his mind than swimwear: most significantly, the document that still informs the look of Benidorm today: the 1956 General Plan For Urban Organisation.
“If you build low, you occupy all the space and have a long walk to the beach,” he said. “If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts.” When new towers are built they must occupy the space required for their ‘single-storey footprint’ – meaning that if a hotel has 100 rooms stacked on top of each other then it must be built in a space sufficiently large to accommodate all of those rooms at ground level. The result was a town filled with skyscrapers, all precisely placed to allow sunshine and sea breezes into every barrio.
The towers that go up today are thinner and taller than ever, and include the graceful Torre Lugano, which at 158m, is the highest residential block on the continent.
This enables a town of 70,000 to accommodate 200,000 visitors at a time, all of whom are in walking distance of the beach. In terms of hotel beds, only London and Paris have more.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea recently dispatched a team of 20 officials for a tour of the Costa Blanca”
“People in Benidorm live in the streets,” says Camarasa. “We don’t have social segregation, everyone interacts with each other. Skyscrapers use less energy, less water and less electricity than regular housing: that’s why representatives from other cities comes here – to learn from what we’ve done.” Indeed, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea recently dispatched a team of 20 officials for a tour of the Costa Blanca, taking in the ‘most sustainable and best-designed city of the Mediterranean’ as a possible blueprint for the development of its own resort in the town of Wonsan on its east coast.
As Benidorm’s bars open up for the evening and the street lighting illuminates its spacious boulevards, the words of Luis Camarasa ring true. “Vertical is the only solution,” he says.
Looking down from the 40th floor it’d be hard to argue with that.
Umbrella’s Benidorm
EAT
Mercat Municipal Benidorm. Get your fill of authentic tapas in the charming Old Town
SHOP
El Cisne Antiguedades. Fantastic weekly flea market that also features live music
STAY
Hotel Bali. The tallest hotel in Europe offers incredible views across the city
Umbrella flew direct to Alicante Airport with British Airways and stayed at the Hotel Bali. With thanks to visitbenidorm.es