Why do Brits go to Benidorm?
For decades Brits have enjoyed package holidays in sunnier climes, in resort towns like Benidorm. But why is that? Where did the package holiday come from?
In Here for the History on BBC Radio 4, Alice Loxton and Ben Henderson unpack the stories which have contributed to the success of the all-inclusive getaway. They start their journey with a Victorian teetotaller, then stopover with a North London entrepreneur, before reaching their final destination – Franco-era Spain.
Pack your sun cream and dive in…
Listen to the episode now!
Tours, Temperance and Thomas Cook
Everyone has heard of Thomas Cook holidays, but what people may not know is that the company’s Victorian founder was responsible for the first real mass tourism.
Thomas Cook was born in 1808 into a poor family. He left school at ten, and after a carpentry apprenticeship he eventually became a Baptist preacher. to train as a carpenter but became a Baptist preacher.
Cook was a committed teetotaller and part of the temperance movement. Its members famously campaigned against alcohol, at a time when many believed industrialisation, and and poverty had contributed to widespread alcohol abusehad led to rampant alcoholism.
In 1841, the preacher Cook was hiking 15 miles across rural Leicestershire to reach a temperance meeting (because he couldn’t afford a horse) when he had a lightbulb moment. Could they harness the new technology of the day – the railways – to transport working people to these meetings?
He waged struck a deal with the newly running Midlands Counties Railway: if they let him use a train, and halved their ticket prices, then he could guarantee twice as many people would travel.
It worked. On 5th of July, 1841, nearly 500 passengers paid one shilling – around five pounds in today’s money – to board Cook’s train from Leicester to Loughborough.
“This must have been absolutely radical at the time,” Ben suggests. Catching a train seems mundane to us but this would have felt like “the space race of the age.”
There was a real party atmosphere. A crowd waved them off and people stood on bridges to try and catch a glimpse of the train as it passed. The carriages, crammed with passengers, were open to the air like rollercoaster carts. Bands on board played music.
In Loughborough, Cook laid on a huge picnic. They played games and, of course, had talks about the evils of alcohol, before returning to Leicester late at night.
“This is the first step in modern tourism,” suggests Alice.
“It's also part of Cook's much wider vision for social reform,” She adds. He really believed that people could improve themselves if they were given the opportunities, and that travel was a big part of this. “It could help broaden the mind, it could help fire the imagination, bring hope to their lives.”
Cook’s first foray into foreign tours
In 1845, Cook organised his first commercial trip, to Liverpool. The following year, it was a lucrative tour of the Scottish Highlands – a remarkably bucolic experience for hundreds of city dwellers.
These trips were a huge success. Cook even wrote guidebooks, one of which was titled (the not terribly snappy) Cook’s Scottish Tourist Practical Directory.
In the 1850s, Cook started to organise trips further afield – to Europe, Egypt, the Americas. Well before the era of cheap flights, people could suddenly get abroad to see the pyramids.
“By the time that Thomas cook dies, which is in 1892, it's thought that he has already facilitated millions of trips, so he's made a massive dent in establishing the tourism industry,” states Alice.
“It's such an unlikely origin story,” says Ben.
“All the history of people getting too drunk on the beach in Mallorca, Magaluf… The hedonism all begins with this really pious Victorian man who just wanted to improve working people’s lives and stop them from drinking.”
The whole package
If Cook was the father of modern tourism, we have another individual to thank for the package holiday.
Vladimir Raitz was born in Moscow in 1922, into a Jewish family. He fled persecution in Russia and Germany and eventually reached London, where he joined Mill Hill School in 1936.
Already fluent in Russian, German, Polish and French, by the end of the academic year the bright student was top of his class in English. He went on to study history at London School of Economics and became a translator for Reuters.
When WWII ended, Raitz went to Calvi in Corsica, where his friends had started a holiday camp. He was tasked with finding some British clients to come and stay. At that point, it took two-days to travel to Corsica by rail and sea, but Vladimir had a brainwave… There were military transporter planes languishing in airfields and bases across Britain. . Could he charter them from the British government?
The state-owned airline, British European Airways, were strongly opposed to the idea but finally relented, stipulating that Raitz could have the planes if the trips were strictly for educational purposes.
And so, Raitz advertised in teaching magazines. The trip would cost £32 and ten shillings (about £900 pounds today). This was less than half the cost of a flight to Nice. It covered travel, accommodation, local wine, and two meals a day with meat (thrilling in an age of rationing) for two whole weeks.
In the summer of 1950 – almost a hundred years after Thomas Cook’s first big trip – 11 teachers and 21 students took off from Gatwick Airport in a lumbering tin can of a military cargo plane. The journey took just six hours.
The holiday was basic. They slept in old US Navy tents. But there was fun in the form of a bar and a dancefloor.
With this trip, Raitz’s company – Horizon Holidays – was born. When the rule about students and teachers was abolished, he started to put trips on to Mallorca and the Costa Brava.
Like Cook, Raitz wanted the man in the street to be able to access travel. He hoped they would acquire a taste for wine and foreign food, learn new languages and make friends in other lands.
More operators soon followed suit. With competition, and developments in aeroplane technology, prices came down and passenger numbers went up.
Five years after Raitz’s package pioneers touched down in Calvi, 77,000 British tourists took a package holiday to Spain.
The package holiday was born.
The end of a bikini ban
The notoriously brutal General Franco was dictator in Spain from 1939. He led the nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and, in the 1940s, amongst other policies, cut the country off from international trade. The Spanish economy had been crippled.
Franco decided to do some U-turns to try and reverse these catastrophic policies. One tactic was tourism; the dictator wanted to position Spain as an iconic tourist hotspot.
The leader devalued the currency, so tourists would get more bang for their buck, and introduced the menú del día, a tourist-friendly set menu.
“It’s like a national rebrand,” says Ben.
These strategies worked. By 1950, there were half a million international visitors to Spain.
But the mayor of Benidorm, a small coastal town with a population of just 2,000 residents, believed there was something holding people back from visiting… The bikini ban.
Spain was a highly conservative Catholic country and Pedro Zaragoza knew that for foreign tourists seeking a suntan, that could be a problem.
“They wouldn't want to cover up on the beautiful beaches of Benidorm,” says Alice.
So, in 1953, Pedro Zaragoza sped to Madrid on his Vesper to ask Franco in person to lift the ban. The General agreed and, defying convention, Zaragoza allowed women to wear bikinis in his town.
“This caused absolute uproar across Spain,” states Alice.
The birth of Benidorm as we know it
Next, to maximise the space available, they began building tower blocks of holiday flats along the Benidorm seafront. This democratic move meant that everyone got a sea view.
There was a big marketing strategy: “Sol y playa” (“Sun and beach”). The aim was to appeal to Northern Europeans, fed up of the cold.
Brits were an easy target.
Zaragoza went on a charm offensive. He visited Parliament, the Mayor of London, and British European Airways HQ, handing out Spanish delicacies like dates and winter oranges. He worked with the airline to get British nurses to Benidorm in the hope that they would spread the word back home.
Under Zaragoza’s leadership, Benidorm increasingly catered to British visitors with English pubs, fish-and-chip shops and other familiar home comforts. In Benidorm, he introduced pubs and fish and chip shops; the Spaniard made Benidorm a hub of Englishness.
By 1962, the number of tourists visiting Spain had reached over six million per year.
It’s funny to think there were some high-minded, egalitarian ideals behind the original all-inclusive trips: Thomas Cook’s temperance movement, Reitz Raitz wanting everyone to have access to foreign culture, Zaragoza’s sea views for all.
“You can go to Benidorm and actually think that you’re part of temperance history,” suggests Alice.
In your bikini, of course.
