The man who invented sun, sea and sangria

Tourists had begun wearing bikinis on his beaches and in staunchly Catholic Fifties Spain this was not going down well with Church and State. Outraged visitors were being slapped with fines by military policemen the moment they drifted off the sand.

The year was 1959 and the forward-thinking young mayor Pedro Zaragoza Orts was appalled that the  tourists he had worked so hard to entice to the Spanish coast were being treated in this manner. So he declared a by-law: it was fine to wear bikinis in Benidorm. The Archbishop of Valencia promptly threatened him with excommunication.

“In those days excommunication was a form of civil death,” Zaragoza once explained. “You became a leper in society.”

So, at three one morning, Zaragoza took matters into his own hands. Stuffing newspapers down his jumper to keep out the cold, he set off on the nine-hour ride to Madrid on his scooter. Once there he presented himself at the Prado Palace: he had come to discuss his little local difficulty with Spain’s fearsome dictator General Francisco Franco himself.

This may have been the equivalent of a frustrated town planner from Aberystwyth taking a bus to lobby the prime minister but so persuasive was Zaragoza – who this week died at the age of 85 – and so intrigued was the dictator by the excitable, oil-stained visionary standing before him that he granted him his wish.

“He asked me how I had come, whether by train or aeroplane, and I said no, on a Vespa,” he recalled in Giles Tremlett’s book Ghosts Of Spain. “That surprised him.” So much so that the dictator sent his wife to the coastal backwater to see Zaragoza’s tourist experiment for herself.

She was impressed by what she saw. The Church backed off and tourists were soon free to wear bikinis wherever they liked in the town without threat of public humiliation.

“If you want people to come to your town for their holidays you have to be ready to accommodate not just them but their culture,” Zaragoza said years later of his triumph.

His enlightened perspective was the turning point for Benidorm, a former fishing village now the major holiday destination for the whole of Europe and which, in its 330 skyscrapers, offers the largest number of hotel beds after London and Paris.

“Without the bikini there possibly would have been no modern Benidorm and precious little tourism in Spain at all,” says Giles Tremlett. The same could be said of the package holiday.

After all, while Zaragoza was growing up, Benidorm had a population of fewer than 1,500: it now has 70,000 residents, swelling in summer to more than five million, including half a million lobster-pink Brits.

Not only did Zaragoza’s vision for a modern Benidorm transform the once-sleepy village but it also created a multi-billion-pound package tourist industry that sparked the careers of some of Britain’s best entrepreneurs.

King Juan Carlos called him El Tanque – The Tank – for his ability to crush obstacles to progress, so it is no surprise that two days of official mourning for Zaragoza were declared in Benidorm after his death on Monday. Thousands of people have already filed past his coffin.

The modern tastes of the town may not be to everyone’s liking – it has 10 fish and chip shops, 600 bars including 70 British-themed pubs and replicas of Wigan and Blackpool piers – but Zaragoza’s genius was to realise that tourists would come if you gave them what they wanted. And what they wanted was all that was familiar from home with a few additions.

“All we had was the sun, the sea and the exceptional beaches,” Zaragoza once said. The harbour was too small to develop the fishing industry, agriculture was in decline, there was no cause to build factories. The potential for tourism was all the town could offer and he spent years of his life making it happen.

It all started when Zaragoza, the son of a sea captain, began to draw broad boulevards on a map where only olive and almond trees stood and where little else would grow due to the soil’s high salt levels.

It was an ambitious, some would say ridiculous, proposition. At the time Benidorm had no modern sanitation – waste was tipped into the sea from buckets – and the only supply of drinking water was sold by a man with a mule dragging a huge cask on wheels. But to Zaragoza such privations had the thrill of a blank canvas.

When at 27 he was appointed temporary mayor – due to his father’s standing in the community – while a more experienced candidate was sought, he seized his chance to realise his vision. He stayed in the post for the next 17 years doing just that.

At a time when the village had only seven cars he was designing avenues 80 metres wide (a compromise of 40 metres was reached). “I was building for the future, even if I never lived to see it,” he said.

Underpinning his ideas was the Plan General de Ordenacion de Benidorm which came into being in 1954. It is still in use today and, according to expatriate journalist Derek Workman, has been adopted by a number of other developing towns in the Costa Blanca. Its principle was one of green space. Although the town is a high-rise development – ensuring all tourists can see the sea from their affordable hotel rooms – every building had to have an area of leisure land surrounding it. Building high on cheap beachfront land was also less wasteful of the countryside.

With a meagre annual budget of just 70,000 pesetas – enough to pay the council’s five employees – Zaragoza had to use his imagination at every turn. He lobbied for the airport to be built at Alicante, offered generous terms to builders, personally oversaw the installation of a 15-mile water pipe and was unstinting in his efforts to raise the town’s profile.

“The stories of Don Pedro’s promotional ploys are endless,” says Derek Workman. Zaragoza’s campaigns included sending boxes of turron (nougat) and cases of wine labelled “bottled in the sun of Benidorm” to the young Queen Elizabeth, and encouraging airlines to fly almond blossom, still in bloom in early December, to sub-zero Stockholm where they were scattered in Nordiska (the Harrods of Sweden) with signs saying: Benidorm, Espana!

“On one occasion, having attended the International Tourist Fair in Cologne, he drove all the way back in a battered old Mercedes nailing up signs reading: ‘To Benidorm, X kilometres’,” says Workman.

But perhaps Zaragoza’s most audacious wheeze was Operation Lapland in which he transported a family of reindeer herders on a tour of Europe’s major cities. At every stop they were required to wear national dress and to carry a sign saying Benidorm.

“People thought I was stupid, trying to get Laplanders to come here on holiday but they missed the point,” Zaragoza once explained. “I was trying to get the name of Benidorm known all over the world.”

His legacy may have taken on a life of its own – he admitted in retirement that he found the lager-lout culture of the Eighties difficult and that some of the more recent development made him want to “weep” – but there can be no doubt that he succeeded in his audacious ambition and changed the face of British holidays for ever.