Spain has 50 million visitors each year. What do they all come for?

Two Great Men

Pedro Zaragoza Oils – Benidorm

‘This is the very spot where I was born, on May 15, 1922’, says Pedro pointing downwards to an imaginary bed that occupied a spot in the family home. The house eventually made way for the block of shops, offices and apartments that became part of an urban plan that took a village of 1,500 souls to a city that is now the major holiday destination of Europe.

As a young man Pedro Zaragoza intended to follow in the footsteps of his father who captained one of the ships of the Transatlantica Line. He soon discovered his heart was not in the shipping industry and began travelling over Spain. With the death of his father, he returned to Benidorm. ‘This is the land of my family, the fields, the houses, it’s the Mediterranean way, it’s important for us. We like to be in a place where all the family is in the cemetery.’

At the end of the 1940s there was no such thing as elections: officials were appointed and on December 10, 1950 the Civil Governor of the province asked Pedro to take over the position of Mayor for three months. Guidebooks state that Benidorm was originally a fishing port, but this was never the case, although villagers did live off the sea. ‘When you have no fresh water and the land is only fit for olives and almonds, you eat a lot of fish!’ exclaims Pedro. ‘Many of the men in the village travelled the world on the liners and cargo ships. They had seen things and knew that they could make a better way of life for us.’ So why tourism? ‘What else? All we had was the sun, the sea and the beaches.’

By the 1960s, visitors from northern Europe were beginning to arrive in droves. In the late 1950s the icon of liberty was the bikini, its roomy bottom and bra top barely recognisable by comparison with today’s string and handkerchief affairs, but in Spain, still held in the firm grip of the Catholic Church and state, this scanty garment was a tool of the devil.

In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite the beach wearing only a bikini was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there. She hit him and her strike for social justice cost a fine of 4,000 pesetas, no mean sum when the average wage was just over 100 pesetas a day. Step forward Pedro Zaragoza. ‘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 as well. People have to feel free to be able to wear what they want if it helps them enjoy themselves. If they enjoy themselves they will not only come back but will tell their friends to come too.’

When Pedro Zaragoza took his ‘War of the Bikini’ to General Franco everyone thought he was mad, but he gained his audience with Franco who decreed visitors could wear the bikini in the streets and plazas of Benidorm, the first town in Spain where they were allowed to do so.

Other stories of Pedro’s promotional ploys are endless. The marketing skills of this small-town boy would put many of today’s business innovators to shame. He sent boxes of turron (almond nougat) and bottles of wine labelled ‘Bottled in the sun of Benidorm’ to Queen Elizabeth, talked the airlines into flying branches of almond trees, still in bloom in early December, to sub-zero Stockholm, and invented the Benidorm Song Contest which eventually became one of the biggest in Europe.

Pedro Zaragoza’s reputation as a pioneer of Spanish tourism is widely acknowledged but for him his life’s greatest achievement is the Plan General de Ordenacion de Benidorm which he brought into being in February 1954. ‘This was an urban revolution. I knew the town would develop and I wanted it to develop in a human way. Many of the landowners were very shortsighted and couldn’t understand why, for example, I wanted an avenue 80 metres wide. Their objections were hardly surprising considering there were only seven cars in the town at the time. They thought 10 metres was enough, so we eventually settled on 40.’

The essence of the plan was that every building would have an area of leisure land surrounding it in direct relationship to the built area, so that whilst Benidorm gained a reputation as being a high rise development, seen from the highest point in the city, it is in fact very green and open. The plan is still in use today, and has been adopted by a number of developing towns on the Costa Blanca.

When he decided to retire as Mayor of Benidorm, Pedro Zaragoza went on to become president of the Diputacion de Alicante, Director General de Empresas y Actividades Turisticas for the Ministry of Information in Madrid, Civil Governor of Guadalajara, Member of Parliament and held high office with many banks and major business.

Pedro Zaragoza feels that his ideas have been justified. Benidorm boasts more hotel stars than the whole of Greece; is arguably the most important holiday destination in Europe and has the highest level of return visitors. And you can still go fishing!