Be careful what you wish for

When the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, allowed himself to be persuaded by the mayor of a little fishing town on the Costa Blanca that the development of a beach resort to attract European package holidaymakers would benefit the Spanish economy, he cannot have imagined he was opening the floodgates, creating an inundation which has since become a deluge.

Franco was hardly renowned as a fun-lover but he seems to have taken to the young Pedro Zaragoza, who had been elected mayor of Benidorm in 1950 aged twenty-eight. He was a tireless promoter of his resort and embarked on a nine-hour journey across Spain on a Vespa to lobby Franco in person to support his plans. Franco was apparently amused by the young man who arrived in Madrid with oil on his trousers to see the feared Caudillo, the dictator of Spain. 

Zaragoza gained Franco's support and his chutzpah paid off when, two years later, he created an enormous scandal by allowing women to wear the newly-fashionable bikini, not only on the beach but elsewhere in town. Such was the outrage of the local Catholic bishops that he was threatened with excommunication but a phonecall to Franco soon squashed that. He remained mayor until 1967, during which time Benidorm had gone from a town with 102 hotel beds to a thriving holiday city. By his death in 2008 Benidorm had 330 tower block hotels attracting five million tourists per year.

Fast forward to today and, to use an appropriate metaphor, the tide is turning against mass tourism in Spain. Two recent examples of this have been the controversial reactions of the Presidents of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and Mallorca in the Balearics to the trend. In Mallorca, Catalina Cladera proposes limiting tourist numbers and increasing prices by one-third to deter budget holidaymakers, while in Lanzarote María Dolores Corujo has called mass tourism an existential threat to her island.

Neither of them appears to be out of step with the popular mood - and with elections approaching in May, one wouldn't expect them to be. Unfortunately, both have chosen to focus their ire on British tourists, which has upset many regular visitors who don't see themselves as budget tourists. In fact, it is quite obvious who the target of this move really is by looking at recent bans on happy hours, pub crawls, two-for-one drink offers, the sale of alcohol in shops between 9:30pm and 8am and the advertising of party boats in certain areas. 

The butt, let's be perfectly frank, is Brits who fly in on package-deals intent on getting a suntan and very drunk - the so-called 'fly-and-flop brigade'. I can attest to the embarrassment caused by my loudmouthed, uncouth, overweight and underdressed, tattooed, lobster-red countrymen and women behaving badly in public.

But before you cry 'snob' let me, firstly, hold my hands up to that accusation with a "guilty as charged" and, secondly, defend my compatriots in one important regard by posing the question: who positively encouraged them to come? The line of complicity goes directly from Sr Zaragoza in the 1950s to Sras Cladera and Corujo in the present day. 

These local politicians, and many like them, have actively colluded in the creation of the current environmental catastrophe that is modern mass tourism - a phenomenon which they now disparage. Having enriched themselves and their backers through poor planning controls and lax enforcement, they now seek to divert attention from their own failings by blaming the very people they have hitherto gone out of their way to attract to their resorts in droves for decades. The stench of hypocrisy is overpowering.

Now that their electoral futures depend on deflecting the blame, their opportunistic xenophobia leads them to seize on Brexit as the perfect cover. The Brits post-Brexit have made themselves even more unpopular by hanging about like the proverbial fart in a lift when it might have been expected that they would stay away. On the contrary, they are coming in even greater numbers. I suspect a majority of them are Leave voters so they only have themselves to blame if populist politicians in the EU have declared open-season on them. They can hardly be surprised but they do have a right to feel angry and offended. 

After all, they were lured to these resorts by the very politicians, and their cronies, who now openly insult them, having provided the infrastructure to accommodate them and enticed them with glossily-advertised promises of cheap booze, golden beaches and a welcome as warm as the endless sunshine. 

A lot of politicians, hoteliers, tour company operators and developers have made themselves very rich indeed by pandering to the lowest-common-denominator requirements of these budget holidaymakers but now that it's becoming a problem they rush to divert attention away from their own failings by blaming the calibre of tourist they themselves sought to attract in the first place. 

Their scramble to turn back the tide, shut Pandora's box, kill Frankenstein's monster, put the genie back in the bottle (or whatever other colourful cliché one might choose to apply) provides a highly unedifying spectacle which reflects very badly on those who are seeking to escape accountability. The British tourists they now reject may be brash and vulgar but at least they're honest about it. 

What's the politicians' excuse?

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