Sun, Sea, Sex and Sangria: A Weekend in Benidorm

Sticky Vicky's reputation precedes her. The things she can do with a ping pong ball will make your eyes water. I won’t go into too much detail on a family website like TM, only to say her routine is not restricted solely to ping pong. According to this, unfeasibly larger items like glass bottles, giant candles, light bulbs and, more disturbingly, razor blades. For her festive show she produces a Christmas tree. I wonder what she does for an encore?

Now approaching 70 (yes, 70), Sticky Vicky has been performing her act to shell-shocked tourists for over 30 years. She continues her seven-day-a-week grind to his day. She has now enlisted the help of her daughter who opens the show with an acrobatic magic act before her mother takes to the stage and takes her clothes off. And this is only one of the “attractions” on offer amongst all the seedy nightclubs touting “lesbian shows”, the free-entry all night “disco-pubs” and reams of tribute acts (Peatloaf, Michael Bauble, and so on), all centered along the notoriously chaotic confines of the so-called Yellow Brick Road. But we are a long way from Kansas. Welcome, then, to Benidorm.

To be fair, the Spanish coastal town has always been sex obsessed. In May this year Benidorm celebrated the 60th anniversary of then-mayor Pedros Zaragoza’s decision to legalise the wearing of bikinis. The decision was reached after a British woman was fined 40,000 pesetas for wearing one at a beach bar. In fear of losing the town’s appeal as a frisky tourist cash cow - especially at a time when the local fishing industry was fractured - Franco’s fascists turned a blind eye. Which is more than can be said about the tourists. Benidorm welcomes five million of them every year, all in search of sun, sea, sex and sangria.

But now in 2012, is Benidorm finally suffering the hangover from 60 years of hedonistic overkill? The east coast of Spain has suffered dramatically from the fallout of the noughties Spanish property boom and the subsequent Eurozone crisis. This is evident from the number of derelict bars you can see, and the building projects abandoned mid-construction. Now there is a genuine fear the cranes might collapse, like they did a couple of days ago near Sotogrande on the Costa del Sol. According to an engineer questioned on the Olive Press website: “Because they are so close to the sea, the salt in the air is eroding the cranes much quicker than would be the case with structures further inland.” A disconcerting thought.

And do I denote a touch of chippiness from the harassed, overworked bar staff? One cafe refused to put onions in their cheeseburgers because it “stinks the place out”. It’s hard to argue against something like that. Another sounded her frustration at the thought of replacing specific elements of the “large breakfast” option. Her reaction seemed to suggest I had asked her to solve the Spanish debt crisis rather than put a spoonful of baked beans on a plate. I sensed she was clearly someone in desperate need of an escape.

The tourists are older here, too. Following the packaged tours of the 1980s and the subsequent violence that ensued, younger revelers decided to forgo the hen and stag parties of Benidorm for the burgeoning bedlam found in Ibiza and Malaga. There's a running joke in the ITV comedy series Benidorm about this, where the elderly cantankerous Madge barges her way through the busy streets on a mobility scooter without actually needing to use one. Wheelchairs and scooters rent from 20 euros a week. The flyers are everywhere.

But coming to visit for a long weekend outside the July-August peak season, everything seems business-as-usual. The popular TV show has no doubt helped to further promote the town in the minds of overseas travelers, and I found the beaches friendly and well maintained. Surprisingly, there are actually some very pretty aspects to Benidorm. I loved the views from the church of San Jaime and the charismatic side-streets and market stalls of the Old Town, like a scene straight out of Granada, and the epic, seemingly endless mountainous surrounds to the west which so define the landscape in this part of Spain. The joy in overlooking a vast ocean vista with caffe con leche and tapas on a glorious day is surely one of the world’s greatest pleasures. No wonder the Spanish don’t get any work done.

The old town is also the best place to take in the full scale of Benidorm’s 6km radius of revelry. Since the 1960s, the playa has become a breeding ground for hotels to rise indiscriminately into the sky - the tallest at 186 metres. But now there is just no escaping the colonising British, as they liberate their minds - and most of their stomach contents - from the cold, workaday routine of life back home. As a result, Benidorm has taken on the puzzling moniker of a “home away from home” for the Brit – the kind of place they can relax without having to concern themselves too much with any of that foreign stuff.

I can’t say I understand a lot of this; particularly those creature comforts that supposedly define "Britishness". Here, "Britishness" is aggressively advertised on every street corner: Guinness and Tetley’s, all day breakfast, the Daily Mail, Sunday carvery, Sky Sports, "Tracey and Tony from Wales welcomes you" and English spoken everywhere. The conditioning is so complete after two nights that a couple conversing in Spanish at the bar sounds particularly alien. “Maybe they’re tourists?” a friend asks. Hold on, I thought we were the tourists?

This manufactured paradise comes at a cost: the ugly flipside of our drinking culture is not a British trait which serves us well, particularly abroad. Benidorm takes every rebellious, binge-drinking, kebab-chewing Saturday night you’ve seen in Leeds, or Bristol, or Blackpool or just about anywhere and spits it right back at you on a regular basis. No wonder the locals have scarpered to the hills.

Now there is talk of a 5am curfew to give the authorities time to “clean up the empty bottles, the rubbish, the vomit”, according to an article in the free Round Town paper. But 5am seems pointless, like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Another tactic may be fining promoters up to 60,000 euros for organising bar crawls. “It’s an unforgivable image,” says Paco Carrasco, owner of a chain of nine pubs. “Nobody wants to be heading into work, or down for an early morning walk on the beach to be confronted by… a group of loud drunks.” I would agree, but then is there anything more British than complaining?