Essay: Costa Concrete

Costa Concrete

The high-rise vacation city of Benidorm

Text by Anneke Bokern
Photo: Alejo Bagué
Benidorm is considered by many to be the biggest eyesore on the Costa Blanca. With its interchangeable architecture and uninterrupted concrete, the compact tourist hotspot is not exactly beautiful. On the other hand, its high-rises are extremely spatially efficient compared to the usual holiday resorts. This stronghold of bargain travel, of all places, has become a model for sustainable beach tourism.

The Costa Blanca is not beautiful. An endless sprawl of housing developments and holiday resorts lines the coast, interrupted here and there by a dusty business park and, of course, by the Benidorm skyline. Granted, the tourist town is not exactly known for its beauty, either — still, its sleek skyscrapers, rising like French fries from the monotony of the urbanizaciones, certainly make an impression. What’s more, few places are as polarizing as Benidorm: Giant low-cost developments and the MVRDV study Costa Iberica, budget tourism and sustainability. How do these things fit together?

Coming by highway, one approaches Benidorm’s absurd skyline gradually — and suddenly finds oneself right in the middle of it. Benidorm has no periphery in the classical sense of the word. The high-rises shoot abruptly out of the arid earth. At the very first roundabout stands the 40-story Neguri Gane, Spain’s tallest residential tower. It’s hard to believe that just 50 years ago, a fishing village stood at this spot. These days, Benidorm is home to 373 high-rises with more than 12 stories, making it the world leader in per capita density of skyscrapers — a title mainly attributable to the fact that Benidorm has only 70,000 permanent inhabitants. In the summer, however, the number of residents swells to 500,000. A full 11 percent of Spain’s tourism revenue is generated in Benidorm alone.
This and following photos: Miguel Loos
»These days, Benidorm is home to 373 high-rises with more than 12 stories, making it the world leader in per capita density of skyscrapers.«
The world’s highest density of high-rises

Benidorm’s development started in the 1950s, when it was still a little village perched on the dead rock between two peaks, home to 2,700 inhabitants. Back then, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza realized the potential of the seven kilometers of sandy beaches and, in 1953, formed an initial development plan. The modern tourist town was meant to be green and airy; as such, only 30 percent of every plot could be developed. And so the first hotels went up, surrounded by gardens, and it wasn’t long before the first visitors followed. This burgeoning boom was almost nipped in the bud when, in 1959, an Englishwoman was fined for wearing a two-piece bathing suit — a bikini — to the beach, which was prohibited in Spain. To avert a possible tourism catastrophe Mayor Zaragoza locally abolished the bikini ban, whereupon the Bishop of Orihuela threatened him with ex-communication.
»The high building density is also a reason that Benidorm — as unlikely as it sounds — has long been viewed as a model for sustainable tourism.«
»This burgeoning boom was almost nipped in the bud when, in 1959, an Englishwoman was fined for wearing a two-piece bathing suit — a bikini — to the beach, which was prohibited in Spain.«
Undeterred and determined, Mayor Zaragoza then jumped on his scooter, drove six hours to Madrid, and obtained a meeting with Spain’s iron-fisted ruler General Franco, who promptly granted an exemption to his trusty follower. Four years later, with Benidorm flourishing more than ever, the building height restrictions were lifted to accommodate the influx of sun-seekers. In 1963, the first high-rise went up: Torre Benidorm.

Strangely enough, Benidorm doesn’t really feel like a big city — skyscrapers notwithstanding. Everything is remarkably clean and orderly; the flowerbeds are maintained, the traffic flows regularly. Retired couples in Bermuda shorts amble along the sidewalks. It’s low season. At a pool tucked between several hotel towers, only a single group of bare-bellied English tourists bellow a drinking song that echoes between the walls. And there are plenty of walls in Benidorm: the backs of the high-rises are completely windowless. In this mono-functional city, everything is oriented towards the beach. Almost all the buildings, even those many blocks back, face the sea, turning a concrete wall to the hinterlands, sometimes adorned by a lone fire escape. Along with the highest per capita density of high-rises, Benidorm must surely also boast the world’s highest per capita density of concrete backsides.
Is this the face of sustainability?
But the high building density is also a reason that Benidorm — as unlikely as it sounds — has long been viewed as a model for sustainable tourism. As Markus Lanz and Sophie Wolfrum wrote in the catalogue to the 2007 exhibition Multiple City, more was built on the coast of Valencia in the last decade than during the entire history of development there. While the coastal region gradually disappears beneath
Photo: Miguel Loos
a ragged carpet of sprawling vacation resorts, Benidorm accommodates four million visitors annually on just 38 square kilometers. And it’s not only the economical use of space that’s exemplary, but also the water consumption: the average Benidorm tourist uses (directly and indirectly) 140 liters of water per day, which, according to sociologist José-Miguel Iribas, is just a quarter of what tourists in typical vacation homes use. An astonishing 97 percent of this water gets recycled as grey water. On top of that, low-energy lamps light the streets of Benidorm, and Benidorm visitors travel primarily on foot. The average tourist walks 14 kilometers per day through the streets and along the beach promenade — a car, after all, is not usually included in holiday packages. The importance of this promenade, designed in 2009 by Barcelona’s Office of Architecture (OAB), is immediately apparent: organically meandering and paved with colorful ceramic tiles, it looks like a cross between Burle Marx’s legendary Copacabana promenade and Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona.

This idiosyncratic combination of budget tourism and sustainability defies the common perception of the environmental stewardship as a luxury item. But the strangest things come together in Benidorm. The city, after all, is also home to a church, whose bell tower integrates the staircase and elevators for a high-rise next-door, filled with vacation apartments. Ultimately, Benidorm refuses to fit into any one box. Can one even refer to such a mono-functional vacation settlement as a “city”? Benidorm has high-rises, yes, but not urbanity by a long shot — it’s too homogeneous for that. And despite — or perhaps because of — the nightclubs and boozing tourists, it’s also much too tame.
Photo: Alejo Bagué
Lanz and Wolfrum call Benidorm “the old city of modernism” referring not to the many retirement-age visitors, but to the fact that the modernist idea on which the city was built is no longer contemporary. Just how right they are becomes clear when one drives a few kilometers out of Benidorm to the brand new, 80-acre golf resort, Villaitana. With its historicized medley of Mediterranean styles, this hotel village — in the center of which sits a restaurant disguised as a baroque church — is much more artificial than Benidorm could ever be. One suddenly realizes what one had with the unabashed mass-tourism of the densely packed colony of high-rises in Benidorm, when viewing its skyline hanging like a mirage on the horizon above manicured golf lawns.

Photo: Alejo Bagué