Benidorm, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, is Europe’s most popular vacation destination, but has suffered for decades at the hands of journalists repeating the same old stories to poke fun at the resort. The fact is that most of these are simply false.

Benidorm has to import sand from Morocco to maintain its beaches. This little gem originated when a travel representative played a prank on his clients while they were riding the bus that took them from Alicante airport to their hotel in Benidorm in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, his comment went down in history of the media. The resort’s seven kilometers of silky soft sand are absolutely natural, and the city actually supplies high-quality sand to several of the local resorts. Benidorm spends more on keeping the beaches clean than most cities on all its streets.

Benidorm was a fishing village before the tourist boom.This is perhaps the pearl of all bad dates and is still used on a regular basis. Benidorm was never a fishing port, the port is too shallow. But the history of the spa has always been linked to the sea. It provided the most skilled crews in the entire Mediterranean for the trap, the complex method by which tuna has been fished since phonic times. It was also the origin of many of the captains and crews of the Spanish merchant fleet, whose experience of dealing with many nationalities during their travels around the world was of great help to them when the world was reversed and began to reach their beach.

Benidorm is wall-to-wall high-rise apartments. In 1954 Pedro Zaragoza Orts, the then young mayor of Benidorm, created the Plan General de Ordenacin (city building plan) that ensured, through a complex construction formula, that each building had an area of ​​’leisure’ land. ‘, mainly gardens and swimming pools, guaranteeing a future free from the excesses of overcrowding in other areas of Spain. It is the only city in Spain that still adheres to this rigid rule, and if you climb to the top of the Sierra Helada, the promontory at the end of the Rincón de Loix, you get a breathtaking view of how green the city is and how close it is. It is from the mountains.

In Benidorm, with its population of … millions of Britons, you hardly hear a Spanish accent. Put whatever number you want on the dotted line because I have seen almost every number between a million and three million used. In reality, there are 463,704 expatriates with permanent residence of all nationalities in total that cover the entire Costa Blanca, a stretch of coast that covers more than 140 kilometers. Benidorm itself has very few permanent expat residents; they tend to congregate in other coastal cities. Altea is predominantly Dutch, German from Calpe and British from Torrevieja. When the complex began its phenomenal boom during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it attracted workers from all over Spain, many of whom established small regional communities in the city. It is, and has always been, the main tourist center for internal tourism (at the beginning of the 20th century it was known as the Madrid beach because of the number of locals who spent their vacations there, and continue to do so), so far of never having listened to a Spaniard. accent, you can hear practically all the accents, dialects and languages ​​of Spain and Latin America.

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