Chasing the Sun: The Coastal High-Rises of Benidorm

It is Friday morning in mid-February in Benidorm, along Costa Blanca in southeastern Spain. Early clouds give way to a sunny morning. The city is already in full swing, like any other day of the year. Along the waterfront, people lounge on the beach, stroll by or ride mobility scooters on the promenade, dance in groups to music from portable speakers, play chess in the open-air public library, enjoy a drink of choice at one of the many cafés, or anything else one can imagine. With its favorable temperatures, endless sunshine, miles of sandy beaches, and unlimited entertainment, tourists from inland Spain and across Europe flock here year-round. As a distinctive and growing melting pot, Benidorm has inspired architectural exploration and photographic studies for decades.

I have had the opportunity to visit Benidorm a few times in the last couple of years, always during winter. Even before my visits, like many others who grew up in Spain, I had been aware of Benidorm (or more specifically, the image it projects—or perhaps unintentionally embodies) since childhood: the Benidorm International Song Festival (which ran for nearly half a century and kickstarted Julio Iglesias’s career in 1968); the stories about Pedro Zaragoza Orts, its most famous mayor; news clips of its packed beaches, which symbolized the start of the summer; the clubs that made it a center of entertainment aiming to rival Ibiza; the saga of the city’s tallest skyscraper and tallest residential building in the European Union. It is a city of everything and more that I find fascinating.

Officially founded in 1325, Benidorm developed as a fishing town from the end of the eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. As the fishing industry declined, the city’s character began changing, beginning in 1956 with the approval of the General Urban Development Plan. Passed under the leadership of Pedro Zaragoza Orts, mayor of the city between 1950 and 1966, the plan was designed to foster tourism in the city, favoring compact and efficient development while creating a network of wide streets and avenues with an orientation toward its beaches. Initially developed with more traditional low-rise buildings, with the start of the British tour operators in the 1960s, the opening of the El Altert airport (now Alicante–Elche Miguel Hernández Airport) in 1967, and the consequent arrival of mass tourism, the city developed vertically very quickly thereafter, facilitated by a 1963 revision of the urban plan.

Reviled for decades by some for its seemingly chaotic development and its mass tourism, the city is now hailed by others as an example of a sustainable use of the territory and natural resources. Since the approval of the 1956 urban plan (revised and expanded most recently in 1986 by a team led by architect Juan José Chiner Vives), the population of Benidorm grew from 5,000 at the end of the 1950s to the current 70,000, with an average monthly floating population of 250,000. This explosive growth has led the former fishing town to rapidly and continuously evolve in order to accommodate the growing needs and desires of residents and visitors.

Nicknamed the “New York of the Mediterranean” or “Beniyork,” Benidorm is considered to have the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world. Along the blocks closest to the beaches and waterfronts—including the award-winning promenade designed by Carlos Ferrater and Xavier Martí of OAB—you can find hundreds of apartment buildings and hotels, from those built in the early 1960s to those recently completed, reaching new heights and offering the latest amenities. The city has the imprint of local and regional architects, including Juan Guardiola Gaya, architect of more than thirty high-rises in the city—including the 1963 Coblanca-1 tower, the city’s first skyscraper—and Luis Giménez de Laiglesia, architect of the significant 1967 Iberia Apartments. The names assigned to the buildings can be grouped in different categories: maritime references, natural features, exotic or faraway places, references to a bygone era of Spain, or homages to particular Spanish locations—probably the birthplace of the developers—with some buildings even named after the developer themselves. All of it creates an ecosystem of buildings and references that capture the evolution of the city and the diversity of its residents.

These photos feature a selection of high-rises built in Benidorm over the past sixty years in order to capture the scale, repetition, and other formal patterns of the façades of these buildings. Due to the city’s orientation toward the beaches, most high-rises feature generous balconies and living rooms facing the Mediterranean Sea, while their back façades are dedicated to circulation corridors, stairs, and elevators. This series is a snapshot of the built fabric of this never-stopping and always-entertaining city.