Costa Del Sol by Maxine Jones
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Vincci Malaga
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If you go to Torremolinos expecting the worse, you won't be disappointed. Barely a blade of grass has escaped the maniacal concretisation of the place. Where there is not concrete there is builder's sand, of a finer variety than the gritty grey stuff on the beach. The centre of Torremolinos is the most distressing. The coach which met my charter flight from Dublin dropped off the first passengers at a huge high-rise block overlooking a carpark. There was a deathly hush as everyone prayed their destination would be less reminiscent of Ballymun. "There are 3,000 hotels in Torremolinos," said our guide proudly as the bus pulled out.
I fared quite well, being dropped at a six-storey hotel in La Carihuela, 2 kms west of the centre of Torremolinos. The hotels along this strip are slightly lower, though still jam-packed next to each other, and most give straight out onto the beach. Many hotels in Torremolinos proper are separated from the beach by hurtling traffic. I walked into a spacious, marbled reception hall and through the far window I could see the hotel pool, the thatched beach umbrellas and the sparkling Mediterranean.
The holiday fulfilled my expectations. I wanted sunshine and a rest from the rigours of family life. A week was all I could spare and money was short. Adventurous it was not. Along the beach runs a paved 'paseo maritimo' lined with souvenir shops and sea-food restaurants. Never was there a more beaten path. However, I was encouraged, on getting up early to watch the sun rise, to see fishing boats bringing home their catch to be cooked later in the day. The fishermen were long gone by the time the fat, red tourists descended in their socks and sandals.
Snide sniggering at tourists is one of the amusements of such a holiday, with the English (for their scruffiness) and the Germans (for their size) generally qualifying for the best laughs. One never classifies oneself as a tourist, of course. Just as traffic is always other people's cars, tourists are always other people. Most of the tourists at this time of year (mid-April) were elderly couples who rarely spoke to each other. I became a keen observer as I shared a table with different couples each evening, my plate piled high from the buffet. The food was an amalgam of national favourites, with a smaller selection of local food. I avoided tables with English-speaking couples, preferring a simple 'Gute Abend' or 'Bon appetit' to a full-scale conversation on exchange rates.
The courteous Andalucian hotel staff were the only indication I was in Spain.They showed no impatience with holiday-makers who made few concessions to their country. The same could not be said of the bus drivers on the Malaga-Estepona line - when I took the bus west for Marbella, the bus driver failed to disguise his impatience with Yorkshire pensioners fumbling for change; the difference being perhaps that, in this area of high unemployment, bus drivers would still have jobs even without the tourist boom.
The dependence started in the 1960s when the tiny fishing villages along the coast were transformed into concrete jungles. In the Eighties, threatened by cheap holidays in Greece and Turkey, the hoteliers instigated a clean-up campaign as many of the resorts had gone from plain tacky to off-puttingly dirty. There is now some attempt at coordinating development and the number of building cranes indicates that the Costa del Sol is still booming.
In Fuengirola, giant signs in English promised more construction. At a large roundabout, hoardings screamed directions to C& A and Dunnes Stores. The bus sped on to Marbella where the glitzy shops and even the street lights and paving indicated a richer class of tourist. Four-wheel drives with foreign number plates were parked on pavements outside designer fashion shops. Richly dressed women walking their dogs stepped gingerly round them on thin heels.
Those who feel Marbella is losing its snob appeal have moved on to the more exclusive Puerto Banus. I walked along the beach which links the two, a leisurely two-hour paddle, stopping off at secluded beach bars where the international clientele discussed the merits of their recent cruises and safaris. The yachts moored at Puerto Banus exuded dizzying levels of wealth. I overheard that Joan Collins used it as a port of call, as did U2. I sailed out of Puerto Banus on the modest 'Victoria S', which for a small fee took me on the half-hour trip back to Marbella.
A 15-minute bus trip eastwards from Torremolinos brought me into Malaga, which, strangely, was populated by Spaniards. Here nobody wears shorts in April and the signs aren't in English. It is a business-like city. Elegant women and sharp-suited businessmen hurried along the pavements bordered with neat lawns and palm trees. They passed the odd group of package-holidaymakers with the same indifference as citizens in war zones who cease to notice the tanks.
I climbed the hill of Gibralfaro for a birdseye view of Malaga's bullring, port and the coastline as far as Fuengirola, 18 miles away. Back down on the Alameda Principal I entered a long, cool barroom and pointed to one of the barrels lining the nicotine-stained walls. The barman filled a glass with a local sweet dark wine and chalked what I owed on the ancient wooden bar in front of me. From a white-aproned old man serving tapas I ordered mussels, squid and clams, zingy with salt and freshness.
I visited the cathedral, lunched in a lively cafe full of young people, and found Picasso's house. In the nearby Museo de Bellos Artes I wondered at the gory style of the paintings. A typical one showed a naked woman with her heart cut out. The paintings seemed stirred by the same passions that fuel the Spanish love for bullfights. In the peaceful Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares, I rested in the courtyard, a two-tiered square of white arches festooned with potted plants and dripping foliage.
A wander round Malaga's covered market with its sumptuous displays of cheeses and chorizo and giant pastries made up for the inauthenticity of the shops along Torremolinos's 'paseo maritimo'. In the equivalent of £1 shops around the market, haphazard English was emblazoned on T-shirts for sale: 'Boyz of the woo', 'Think fast, live slow', 'Peanut Butter'. I weighed myself down with cheap, colourful flowerpots.
An abiding memory of Andalucia is of bright potted geraniums brimming over dazzling white walls under a deep blue sky. The hill village of Mijas just a short bus-ride inland from Torremolinos is full of them. The day I visited, the whole village had turned out for a "carrera", a marathon running race with heats for all age groups, which seemed to last all day. Mijas boasts Spain's only square bull-ring, the oldest in the country going back to Moorish times. There is a museum inside with wonderfully kitsch bull-fighting memorabilia. A nearby church offers the best in Catholic kitsch, statues of Our Lady wearing real clothes and wigs - one blond, one brunette. The predominant colour is gold and the red patterned carpet on the altar looks as if it belongs in an old woman's living-room. On the bus journey back, three elderly local couples distracted me from the hairpin-bends by breaking into staccato syncopated hand-clapping to which they joined their voices in a stirring Andalucian song.
Back in the hotel at dinner, an elderly French woman tried to engage her husband in a conversation about how nice the tomatoes were. He ignored her. Later that night I tuned into a radio station sponsored by Dunnes Stores in Fuengirola. The Irish host, Maurice, was eagerly paying tribute to all the kitchen suppliers, restaurants and Irish bars along the Costa and exhorting me to pay a visit to Bill and Sue from Blackburn who ran the Wonkey Donkey bar (or some such) or Trevor and Sandra in their superb high-quality boutique. I waited for a break in the advertising but there wasn't one.
Already I had my next trip planned. Forgetting charters and packages I would base myself in Malaga and make trips inland to discover more of what this area of Andalucia really has to offer.
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