Benidorm is a much-derided city, but usually by people who have never allowed the soles of their artisan-made shoes to touch its promenade. These are the reliable conformists of our age: the taste-policed, the professionally affronted, the newspaper-reared middle class who are instructed in their preferences with the regularity of a sacristan changing candles. They recoil at Benidorm in the way parsons once recoiled at the music hall. One need not dislike these people in order to understand that their judgement should be quarantined.
“The rising of the sun was a triumph. It came up, as is said all over Spain, dancing.” - South from Granada by Gerald Brenan
Ludwig Klages, ever perceptive about the mass hypnosis of his time, warned that “the great masses, who have never been… more subject to hypnotic suggestion… have become the puppets of public opinion”. Today’s “masses” wear expensive athleisure and live in houses with Farrow & Ball paint, yet their susceptibility remains undiminished. They dislike Benidorm because they have been told to.
But outside this taste-industrial complex lies a city that has quietly become one of the most revealing cultural experiments in Europe — a place where architectural freedom, working-class exuberance and Mediterranean sun collide to produce something at once democratic, chaotic, jubilant and utterly unembarrassed.
Benidorm may not be loved by the style pages, but it is fiercely loved by millions of Europeans who return year after year. These are not dupes. They are people who want, in the simplest sense, to be free to have a good time.
The taste that dare not speak its name
The European middle class, which prides itself on individuality while behaving in eerie synchrony, insists that every city reproduce its comfort blanket of approved features: heritage façades kept at a safe aesthetic temperature, coffee shops decorated according to a pan-European algorithm, pubs drained of atmosphere but heavy with craft beers, and graffiti that has passed the appropriate aesthetic vetting — the Banksy school of moral uplift with some tedious message about late capitalism. Even rebellion must be pre-laundered. Benidorm obliges none of this. Its skyline is a delirious improvisation, a Mediterranean Manhattan assembled without guilt or guidance, the collective result of postwar aspiration, explosive tourism, and a local government that did not so much plan as permit.
This true permissiveness is precisely what damns it in the eyes of cultural gatekeepers. They prefer their freedom domesticated — freedom with rules, freedom with a dress code, freedom with correct wine pairings. Benidorm is the opposite: a city whose very existence suggests that large numbers of ordinary Europeans, given sunshine and a blank sheet of coast, will build something exuberant, vertical, noisy, and unashamed.
It is this spontaneity, not the neon, that offends. The place reveals an uncomfortable truth: the working class does not require the permission of the educated class to enjoy itself.
Ortega y Gasset, writing a century ago, fretted about the “vertical invasion of the masses”, which he feared would swamp the fragile aristocracies of taste. Yet in Benidorm something subtler occurs. The masses have not invaded the citadel of culture; they have built their own — taller.
A skyline without shame
Benidorm’s architecture began its upward march in the 1960s, during the Francoist economic thaw, when Spain realised that sunshine was exportable and northern Europeans were eager customers. What emerged is one of the most unusual skylines in Europe: towers with no aesthetic through-line, no overarching ideology, and no concern for consensus.
Consider the Gran Hotel Bali, 52 floors rising to 186 metres — long the tallest hotel on the continent. Or the Intempo building, the great bronze exclamation mark, shaped (its architects insist) to evoke the female form, though which part of the female form remains open to interpretation. These towers look as though they have no business being on the Iberian coast, yet their incongruity is part of their charm: modernity has gatecrashed the Mediterranean.
And the city’s architectural audacity is not ending politely. The TM Tower — approved with the kind of laissez-faire urban confidence now extinct in much of Europe — is rising to 230 metres with 64 floors, and will become Spain’s tallest residential building upon completion in 2028. Try imagining a coastal town in France or Italy receiving permission for such an intrusion. Committees would form, protestors would knit banners, op-ed columnists would weep for the endangered dignity of the horizon.
Benidorm, meanwhile, shrugs and builds.
There is a kind of muscular democracy in this. A city that has never apologised for its towers is also a city that has refused to apologise for the people who inhabit them. It is a place where modernism did not require a manifesto, only demand; where height was not symbolic of capital but symbolic of possibility.
Reyner Banham, who wrote of Los Angeles with delighted abandon, would have understood Benidorm instinctively: a city formed by choices people actually made, not choices planners hoped they would.
A short history of the Spanish frontier
Before the skyscrapers and sunbeds, Benidorm was part of the Moorish Kingdom of Valencia. For centuries it bore the name Medina Benidorm and served as a trading post in that mobile, sea-facing world where Arabic, Iberian and Mediterranean cultures intermingled. The Reconquista folded it into Christian Spain, and a charter by James I confirmed its place in the Valencian world.
The Spanish Civil War passed over the town with the same grim logic it applied elsewhere. The Republicans held it; the Nationalists took it. When peace returned, the village remained modest until the postwar tourism boom transformed the entire coast.
This is important because Benidorm’s present exuberance is not some deviation from its past but its latest layer. Moorish ingenuity in water management and agriculture; Christian resettlement; fishing villages hardened by the Levantine sun; twentieth-century mobility; the mass democratisation of the holiday.
Where many European cities become embalmed in their own heritage, Benidorm has never lost its frontier character. It moves, grows, adapts. It refuses to become picturesque. Picturesque is what happens when life has fizzled away.
The Politics of the beach
Benidorm offers more than good weather, though with 320 days of sun a year, the weather alone is reason enough to abscond from northern misery. What it offers is a certain sovereignty.
On these beaches, a Dutchman may dress head-to-toe in orange without becoming the subject of a column in de Volkskrant. An Englishman may be exuberantly English without fear that a BBC reporter will diagnose him as a cultural throwback. Germans, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Poles — all find themselves in a temporary republic of tribal identities.
And here lies the quiet heresy. In Benidorm one sees, not the Brussels vision of Europe — sleek, officious, homogenised, boring — but an organic European Union, improvised at street level. No harmonisation directives, no cultural smoothing, no bureaucratic Esperanto. Merely the tribes of the continent coexisting with the ease of people who require no formal introduction.
This is what snobs cannot bear: the working class at play, unobserved by the so-called moral authorities of their home countries and unpenalised for pleasure.
In an age when so much behaviour is monitored, graded, or shamed, Benidorm is a respite from nannyish oversight. Europe’s respectable classes speak incessantly of “freedom”, yet appear unable to recognise it when it stands before them — cigarette in hand, football shirt over beer belly, laughing without embarrassment. Benidorm’s notion of liberty is more elemental: smoke curling over the promenade, chants at improbable hours, laughter carrying past midnight.
One is reminded of Pascal’s remark that all human unhappiness begins with the inability to sit quietly in a room. Benidorm solves this problem by abolishing the room.
Beaches that refuse to behave like brochures
Playa de Levante and Playa de Poniente are not just beaches; they are amphitheatres of European sociology. Levante is louder, younger, more northern in its demographic profile. Its seafront bars hum with English football chants, German conviviality, and mindless Europop.
Poniente, by contrast, is older, quieter, more Spanish; its promenade, designed by Carlos Ferrater in bright Miró-esque mosaics, undulates like a seashell. The path of blues, reds and yellows feels like a painter’s daydream.
To maintain the fun, the beaches are kept impeccably clean. Machines rake the sands at dawn; men tending them before the day’s onslaught. Even chaos requires its hidden custodians.
Catholicism and camp
Benidorm’s Old Town is a compact collision of the sacred and the louche. On one street stands the Church of San Jaime and Santa Ana, its blue dome shining. On another, the drag bars beckon middle-aged women into evenings of gleeful vulgarity.
Everything is tightly packed, as though the city planners — had there been any — decided to compress the entire European cultural spectrum into a few hundred metres: piety, kitsch, drink, baroque architecture, coarse jokes, devotional tiles.
The Old Town is what happens when genuine communities, not consultants, shape a place.
The archeology of eating
On dining, one must first acknowledge the obvious: a significant proportion of Benidorm’s restaurants proudly display their offerings as laminated photographs, producing multi-lingual menus whose chief virtue is clarity rather than subtlety. These establishments serve the broad-based fried crowd-pleasers demanded by sunburned Europeans who want dinner to arrive swiftly and recognisably.
Benidorm’s culinary landscape mirrors the rest of the city — plural, unpretentious, and never limited by the anxieties of taste. For every photographed schnitzel or full English with mug of tea there are seafood restaurants, specialist kitchens and even haute-cuisine outposts for those who prefer their plates undecipherable at first glance. The city accommodates every appetite without attempting to educate any of them.
Valencian cuisine is influenced by Moorish flavours and Mediterranean fishing culture. Paella Valenciana — chicken, rabbit, beans, saffron — remains the region’s culinary star. The more maritime arroz a banda was born of fishermen cooking with what they could not sell. Fideuà, the noodle-based cousin of paella, is a relatively modern invention. Eel stews like all i pebre, though harder to find, speaks of the Albufera wetlands.
Aqua de Valencia — a blend of cava, orange juice, vodka and gin — is best consumed at a beachside table where the light lasts into the evening and conversation becomes softer around the edges.
You do not need recommendations for individual restaurants. Half of them change every season and the other half change their chefs. Instead, seek out the dishes, the drinks, and the layers of history beneath them.
The argument for Benidorm
To praise Benidorm is not to ignore its imperfections but to recognise its significance. In a continent obsessed with self-presentation, here is a city that refuses to audition. It does not ask for approval. It does not pretend to be tasteful. And yet, in its improvised skyline and sun-drenched democracy, it expresses an unapologetic embrace of freedom.
Benidorm is a rebuff to the rebuff, a rejection of the cultural mandarins who recoil at anything not ratified by the weekend supplements. It is the working class enjoying the fruits of its labour without intermediaries. It is a postcard of modern Europe in its unvarnished form: multilingual, curious, half-chaotic, occasionally absurd, but ultimately joyous.
The city is a reminder that taste can become a tyranny and that snobbery is simply another form of conformity. The people who sneer at Benidorm once sneered at the seaside holiday itself. They dislike the masses not because the masses are vulgar but because the masses are free.
Gerald Brenan, writing of the Andalusian light, spoke of mornings when “the sun came up dancing”. Benidorm’s sun, too, dances on the reddened bodies of northern Europeans who have temporarily escaped their weather, their governments, their anxieties and their class performances.
Benidorm is not a city to judge or be judged.
To walk its promenade at dusk, the towers glowing bronze, the air smelling faintly of sea-salt and sunscreen, is to witness a kind of civic unselfconsciousness now rare in Europe. It is the democracy of the sunbed; a utopia of low expectations and high spirits; a city that has never been curated into submission.
