Despite spending the summers of her youth in Fuengirola, watching the foreign tourists at play and devouring the English-language paperbacks she found in a little bookshop in the Andalucían town, nothing could prepare Esther García Llovet for the spectacular unreality of the place that inspired her noir novel Spanish Beauty.
“Benidorm is something of a myth in Spain – and a myth that no one goes to because there’s this stigma that Benidorm is the worst place in Spain,” says the writer.
But on a working visit to the famous Costa Blanca resort a few years ago, she fell in love with its skyscrapers, its peculiarities and even its sky, which, as she writes in the book, is “the colour of Fanta”.
“It’s not that it’s nothing like Spain; it’s that it’s not like anything else,” says García Llovet. “It looked to me like the future and it looked totally out of place – and that made it very attractive.”
Spanish Beauty, which was published in English last week and which is being developed as a film, follows Michela McKay, a cynical, vermouth-downing and dazzlingly corrupt Policía Nacional officer as she trawls Benidorm for her missing British father and for a Dunhill cigarette lighter that once belonged to the British gangster Reggie Kray.
The book’s supporting cast includes local lowlifes, washed-up Brits, Russian heavies and, last but certainly not least, Benidorm itself.
As García Llovet has it in the novel’s opening pages: “Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays.
“Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea.”
The novelist’s English-language debut has proved timely. The week before it came out, Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a 12-point plan to tackle the housing crisis that has brought tens of thousands of people on to the streets to protest over unaffordable rents – and the not unrelated issue of overtourism.
Among his proposals are higher taxes and tighter regulation for tourist flats and, most grabby of all, the introduction of a tax of up to 100% on properties bought by nonresidents from countries outside the EU, such as the UK.
Sánchez has also floated the idea of a complete ban on non-EU, nonresidents buying houses and flats.
Although García Llovet suggests her beloved Benidorm is something of a special case – “It’s a city that was invented for tourism” – she is well aware of the price that Spain has paid for its decades-long addiction to tourism and, more recently, to speculator investment.
“It’s got a lot to do with my book and it’s got a lot to do with everything that’s happening in terms of rent prices,” she says. “Obviously, not all of the rent question is down to tourism – not by any stretch of the imagination – but Airbnb, which has been here for about 12 years, has been a cataclysm when it comes to renting.”
These days, García Llovet prefers not to walk through the centre of Madrid, the city where she has lived for decades, because it no longer resembles the place she once knew.
“Everything that was genuine about the city has been sold off or disguised,” she says. “It’s really odd and really messed up. The shop windows are always the same and Starbucks is always in the same place, wherever you go. I don’t think that’ll change any time soon because tourism has just surged deliriously since Covid.”
She is also dubious about the efficacy of some of the prime minister’s proposals. “Even that 100% tax on property purchases by nonresidents from outside the EU would just be a drop in the ocean. It won’t change anything. It’s awful and I don’t know where it’s all going to end.”
Towards the beginning of the book, she reflects on what draws so many foreigners to Spain and on the resulting gulf between tourists and locals. The Russians who have descended on Benidorm are a case in point.
“They want Spanish hedonism,” the novel’s protagonist argues. “Dionysian hedonism that only the tourists and the travel agents get to see, because the reality here is that we’re always really pissed off and really burned, not just by the sun. The Russians want the hedonism we don’t get to enjoy, they want the prices we can’t afford, they want the siesta we can’t even take.”
For all Spanish Beauty’s musings on the nature of mass tourism – “We don’t make history any longer. We make sangria” – its author also recognises the progress and development it has brought.
“We’ve also benefited from all this,” she says. “There was a moment in this country when tourism was just brilliant – of course there was. But it’s got out of hand and we’ve created a monster – a sangria-drinking monster.”
García Llovet, whose favourite authors include Roberto Bolaño, César Aira and Martin Amis, is curious to see what English-speaking readers make of the book and its depiction of one of their favourite destinations. While she hopes the humour and affection come across, she wonders how much visitors will recognise.
“Tourists, and even people who stay on here,” the writer notes, “have a completely different vision of the country.”
• Spanish Beauty by Esther García Llovet (translated by Richard Village) is published by Foundry Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
