Authors: Giles Tremlett
Foreign visitors might be surprised to know, however, that this is also a big resort for Spaniards, with a large community of ‘ex-pat’ Basques and a large number of second homes for those from Madrid. It also has a reputation, amongst Spanish
pensioners
, for being the best place in Spain for picking up members of the opposite sex.
Benidorm has also become a huge joke. British newspapers occasionally come here to sneer. I know this because, as a
correspondent
, I have done it too. But I also have a creeping respect for this carbuncular miracle, this slick, garish tourism machine that sells one thing, and one thing alone – the pleasure of a two-week holiday away from the accounts department, telephone sales or the factory floor. No one is forced to come to Benidorm, yet 5
million
visitors do every year. When Spaniards think that someone has spotted an opportunity and made the most of it they say he is ‘
ni tonto, ni perezoso
’ – ‘neither stupid, nor lazy’. Perhaps that should go as a motto on Benidorm’s fake shield.
I asked Zaragoza what he thought of criticism that Benidorm was an ugly blight. ‘I don’t know if Benidorm is more or less attractive to look at than it was, but it is definitely more liveable,’ he replied. ‘We have running water, we have asphalt, we have hospitals. We didn’t have them before.’
The thought of criticism, however, soon made him angry. The critics, he said, had mostly never set foot in Benidorm. He had heard, on the radio, a town councillor from Marbella warning that that glitzy rich-man’s resort on the southern Costa del Sol was going to rack and ruin. ‘He had the nerve to say that it was going to end up like Benidorm. I rang him up, but he would not come to the phone. They’ve got forty wealthy people who go
there, and the day they all go off to Morocco – which they might – they are sunk.’
Were there really only forty families in Marbella, I would not have been sitting, a couple of months later, in the traffic jam on the road that runs east-to-west, more or less along the beach, towards Málaga. This is the old Herculean Way. It was used, in ancient times, by travellers from the south. Now it is clogged up by people from all over the world. It ends, or begins, where the twin Pillars of Hercules rear up at the mouth of the
Mediterranean
. Legend has it that Hercules, busily completing his twelve labours (it was the tenth), travelled along it on his way to steal the oxen of the three-bodied giant Geryon. He put the pillars up as a memorial to his difficult journey. One version of the tale also has him splitting the mountain between them to let the
Mediterranean
and Atlantic meet. The Pillars are, of course, the Rock of Gibraltar and, at what sometimes seems like spitting distance, Morocco’s towering Jabal Musa, where a last offshoot of the Atlas Mountains runs into the sea.
A new toll motorway was opened a few years ago, further up in the hills, but nothing gets rid of this traffic jam. It is as much a part of Marbella’s summer as the constant rumours that Saudi Arabia’s royal family has decided to make one of its rare visits. The family owns a huge palace complex, which includes a replica of Washington’s White House, on what is known as the Milla de Oro, the Golden Mile. The palaces sit, empty and aloof, with the people of Marbella watching anxiously for signs of activity.
In a way, however, Zaragoza was right about the forty families. Marbella has two kinds of summers. There are the normal bonanza years, when the place fills up with minor Spanish celebrities and politicians, with Scandinavian yachtsmen, British golfers, Dutch tennis players, Russian and Italian mafiosi or those seriously, even professionally, devoted to their own tans and scalpel-aided good looks. Then there are the bonanza years when half a dozen Saudi Boeing 747 airliners touch down at Málaga airport. The monarch descends (the former King Fahd, in his wheelchair, used to be lowered on a mechanical goods ramp) and the deluge begins. The
rest of what Zaragoza calls the forty families, the immensely wealthy gulf sheikhs and assorted billionaires with mansions here, are likely to follow suit, if they are not already here.
All, suddenly, is excess. On Fahd’s final visit in 2002, a fleet of five hundred brand-new Mercedes hire cars appeared on
transporters
from Germany, just to cope with the needs of his
household
. Fahd stayed for seven weeks with a retinue of some 3,000 people. Several hundred five- and four-star hotel rooms were block-booked for the period; half a dozen vast, multi-decked, gleaming, presumably teetotal, gin palaces were moored in the port at Puerto Banús; an entire floor of the local hospital, of which he is a generous benefactor, was reportedly placed on standby for the sickly monarch. His visit was said to have injected some 70 million euros into the town. Unfortunately for Marbella, it was only the fourth time he had come here to the palace
complex
he named An-nada, The Dew. When he died in 2005, the town hall declared three days of mourning.
Marbella is the other extreme of Spanish tourism. If Benidorm is buckets and spades, fish ’n’ chips and stand-up comics, Marbella is designer boutiques, ostentatious wealth and the lap-dancing clubs of Puerto Banús. But if Benidorm is, however horrific, a monument to hard work and determination, Marbella, with its triumphal arches, boastful monuments and brash, ornamental opulence, is a monument to corruption and uncontrolled greed. Benidorm blights the landscape, Marbella simply rapes it. Much the same can be said for the rest of the Costa del Sol.
Unlike Benidorm and the Costa Blanca, the Costa del Sol has always attracted visitors. Well before Britain’s criminal classes discovered, in the 1960s, that the lack of an extradition treaty made this the perfect hideaway in the sun, adventurous
travellers
were making their way to the beaches near Málaga. They were attracted by its port and a climate that rarely sinks, even in winter, to below 13 degrees centigrade, (55 fahrenheit). It was, in fact, during winter that visitors from the north would arrive in the 1920s, fleeing the rain-soaked, chilly weather of Britain and the north. Summer tourism was not really invented until the
1950s when, as one contemporary observer noted, northern Europeans began to ‘roast themselves on the beach throughout the torrid August days in a way that fills the local inhabitants with concern’. The first tourists, as tourists do, stuck out like sore thumbs. ‘The ladies are conspicuous for their hats,
shopping
-bags, shapeless coiffures, and resolute expressions, features that are all absent from the Spanish woman,’ the same
commentator
, a British woman who had settled here a decade earlier, observed with obvious distaste.
The writer Laurie Lee arrived here in 1934. He was just nineteen and had reached Vigo, in Galicia, several months earlier by boat with just a handful of shillings and a violin. He wandered across the country by foot, occasionally joined by Spanish tramps,
busking
with his violin, a remarkable journey set out in
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
. Approaching Málaga from Cádiz, he walked along the coast, sleeping on the beach, occasionally immersing himself in the silent sea.
The road to Málaga followed a beautiful but exhausted shore, seemingly forgotten by the world. I remember the names – San Pedro, Estepona, Marbella, and Fuengirola … they were salt-fish villages, thin-ribbed, sea-hating, cursing their place in the sun. At that time one could have bought the whole coast for a shilling.
Far out to sea, through the melting mist, would emerge a white-sailed fishing fleet, voiceless, timeless, quiet as air, drifting inshore like bits of paper. But they were often ships of despair; they brought little with them, perhaps a few baskets of poor sardines. The women waited, then turned away in silence. The red-eyed fishermen threw themselves down on the sand.
In the late 1950s, Torremolinos – just down the coast from here, near Málaga – joined Benidorm, the Costa Brava and Majorca as one of the Meccas of the newly-invented package tourism. Before the Civil War it had been a hang-out for bohemian British and American artists. A retired British major installed himself in the town’s Santa Clara castle, pursuing his own eccentric form of spiritual, contemplative endeavour. He eventually gave all his money to the poor and handed the castle over to his gardener’s
family on the condition that they let him live his final days in a bare, whitewashed room overlooking the sea.
An idea of what has been lost here can be given by two other British travellers. Writer Rose Macaulay stayed at the major’s
castle
, already transformed into a hotel, in 1949. There she met the only English tourists encountered during a long trip around the country. She swam out to sea at night and looked back to see ‘here and there, a light’. Nowadays she would see nothing but light. The economist Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, who lived here with her German farmer husband, rode her horse along the deserted seafront in the early 1950s. She swam on a beach where ‘you never see anyone … except an occasional coastguard and his dog, and can float for hours on the calm water, revelling in the
spaciousness
of sea, moor and
vega
, and exulting in the illusion that this vast world was made for you alone.’ It was a time, impossible to imagine now, when the sands were thickly studded with
pinky-white
, strong, sweet-scented
Pancratium maritimum
lillies.
A few years earlier, in Marbella, a German aristocrat and entrepreneur, Alfonso de Hohenlohe, made a bid for the opposite end of the tourism market. He wanted to attract the type of Rolls-Royce-driving travellers who went to Cannes, Nice or Sardinia. He set up a beach club and hotel. Around it clustered new hotels, shops and restaurants catering for the very rich. Marbella grew, slowly and serenely to begin with, then frantically and uncontrollably.
The arrival of Fahd, and the building of his complex of palaces and mosques at El Rocío, sealed Marbella’s status as a Mecca for wealth in the 1970s. Uncontrolled greed, and growth, set in. It is still growing today, a fast-expanding sprawl of
urbanizaciones
, erasing everything in their path. Even Hohenlohe would flee the ensuing nightmare.
‘If I could destroy the horrors of Marbella, I would do. But I suspect I would need a lot of dynamite,’ he said in one of his last interviews. ‘Marbella enjoyed a simple sort of luxury, not at all pretentious, something appreciated by cosmopolitans – which does not mean those with most money. Today there are many rich
catetos
, oafs, who do not understand the meaning of sobriety.’
Sobriety is the last word one would associate with modern Marbella. It certainly does not describe the man responsible for the twenty-first-century version of it, the corrupt,
medallion-wearing
, millionaire property developer, football club owner and all-round thug, Jesús Gil y Gil. Fed up with paying backhanders to previous Marbella town halls while still having some of his
property
deals blocked, Gil ran for mayor himself with his Grupo Independiente Liberal, or GIL, party, in 1991. He pledged a heavy hand with beggars, bag-snatchers and hippies. He also promised greater freedom to build. Some expected a ‘fairer’ system of
corruption
, too. The people of Marbella liked Gil’s offer. They repeated over two more elections. ‘I am a liberal dictator,’ Gil once declared. If ever a people have deserved what they have got, it is the Marbellís – though the original race is now buried, if not under concrete, at least under the weight of Spanish and other immigrants.
Gil was already infamous in Spain. He first hit the headlines when he went to jail in 1969. A hotel he built near Segovia fell down on a conference of insurance agents, killing fifty-eight of them. Gil had tampered with the architects’ plans and skimped on construction materials. He later went down on bended knees to beg clemency from a government minister. General Franco’s regime freed him after 18 months. Gil eventually returned the compliment by placing a bust of the Generalísimo in the foyer of Marbella’s town hall. His political discourse in the 1990s included occasional references to ‘Jewish-Masonic plots’. ‘I once said that we lived better under Franco and I am now more convinced of this than ever,’ he declared a few years before his death in 2004. At local elections in 1999 Gil won 90,000 votes in the Costa del Sol. His area of control spread to the Spanish north African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and to other towns between Gibraltar and Marbella.
Gil perfected the system of running a town, and improving his personal fortunes along with those of friends and collaborators, through corruption and speculation. The more or less colourful Costa del Crime British crooks made way for big hitters from
Russia or Italy. Men like Russian Leonid Terekhov, head of Moscow’s hard-nosed Medvekovo mafia syndicate, arrived. Guns appeared. Frenchman Jacques Grangeon, a Marseilles drug smuggler, was gunned down with his wife Catherine in their Marbella villa. Tit-for-tat killings came with the laundered cash and no-questions-asked policy at the town hall.
Corruption spread. The chief judge at the local court was forced to leave after it was revealed that her brother, a wealthy Marbella businessmen, was doing deals with the same Italians whose cases were before the court. Her father, meanwhile, turned out to have been the court’s senior clerk. Several British people awaiting trial were among those who claimed during the 1990s that they had been told a cash payment would secure a ‘not guilty’ verdict.
When 15,000 pages of paperwork relating to seven Gil corruption cases involving 60 million euros of municipal funds disappeared from the local court, police went to visit court clerk Francisco Calero at his suspiciously luxurious apartment. While the police were searching his cupboards, Calero ran out of the apartment and up onto the building’s roof. Then he hurled himself off. He took Gil’s secrets with him. Fear, or shame? Whichever it was, Calero’s demise was an example of death by corruption.
Gil’s verdict on the court papers being served on him
continually
was that they were useful to him as
papel higiénico
, toilet paper. Anti-corruption prosecutors from Madrid eventually put Gil in their sights. But the medallion-wearing man whose size saw him nicknamed ‘Moby Gil’ continued to duck and dive. He threatened, bribed, cheated or simply defeated his opponents in court. He surrounded himself with loyal thugs. My only brush with him was to park beside his, already double-parked,
chauffeur-driven
car for a couple of minutes at Madrid’s Barajas airport. A large, aggressive chauffeur appeared, a suspiciously baggy jacket covering the bulge in his chest. He suggested I might like to move elsewhere. I ignored him and raced into the airport to grab a
waiting
friend. The look on his face when I came out, however, told me that only the presence of two small children in the back of my car had saved me from serious reprisals.