An Anglo-Spanish Nightmare
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista BY RAY ALAN An Anglo-Spanish Nightmare Kino Juan Carlos of Spain could charm a republican of f a barricade; Lord Nicholas Gordon Lennox is the kind of ambassador who makes...
...Backed by their breathtaking tradition in art and building (as Jan Morris has said, they were the greatest builders between the Romans and the Americans), they have come to terms with modern technology and industry, and export cars and machine-tools as well as wines and fashion goods...
...Year after year, more than half the foreign drug-smugglers, delinquents and hooligans arrested in Spain are British...
...Greed and speculation, Spanish and foreign, have already ruined fine stretches of coastline and converted vast areas into visual, environmental and moral disaster areas no sane family would want to live in...
...Sociologists say the offenders tend to be alarmingly uneducated, ignorant of the world outside their region and social class, and afflicted with a social inferiority complex that seeks the security of the herd and compensation in alcohol and violence...
...Under stereotyped headlines like holiday HORROR, PAIN LN SPAIN and SPANISH nightmare, and playing crudely on xenophobic and maso-puritanical reflexes, the London tabloids have a fiesta with the miseries of Brits who venture abroad...
...Most of those I had met around the Mediterranean were happy and felt privileged to be there...
...An ambassador's report is seen by only a tiny circle...
...Rupert Murdoch's rabidly anti-Hispanic Sun is the cock of this cloaca, closely followed by the Star and Mirror...
...Last SeptemberaThomsonofficial admitted that 10 per cent of the hotels used by the firm in Spain were not up to standard...
...but that's 150,000 people...
...The British were once eager wanderers...
...Of these, 12 million were French, 7.6 million British and 7 million German...
...Double booze prices, put more policemen on the streets, and British tourists will behave better...
...a headline in a tabloid can poison the minds of millions...
...but—so ingrained is xenophobic meanness—a major London tabloid headlined the story: hell resort pays up...
...Cordial in the late 1970s after Franco's death, Anglo-Spanish relations are now the prickliest in the European Community—not at the palace or chancellery level, but in the minds of many ordinary folk and the columns of the papers they read...
...Even the fights that break out in bars between groups of British youths, even the "uve sex" acts staged in some British-owned pubs in resorts like Benidorm, are denounced by outraged tourists as part of the Spanish scene...
...They could still live well with 10-15 per cent fewer tourists, especially if they discouraged the bottom-of-the-barrel trade...
...and UK travel firms, reacting to Spanish complaints, say that if exchange rates hold steady they will switch some of their package trade to United States resorts...
...Pour in the storms and flash floods that may sluice Mediterranean resorts in the fall...
...The King even went to England last year to help commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588...
...They have emigrated by the million in search of a better climate and a more open society...
...Certainly the British going to Spain are mainly people who have never discovered thepleasuresof exploring, planning their own itineraries and learning enough of a new language to greet people, ask the way or order a meal...
...Some UK commentators answer: "Drinks are too cheap in Spain, and there aren'tenough police on duty...
...Many packaged Brits do feel disenchanted after their week or fortnight by the Med...
...Where are Starsky and Hutch these days...
...One Foreign Office official recently pointed out: "Police and consular records suggest that only about 2 per cent of British tourists in Spain are horrors...
...They give Britain a bad reputation all round...
...They'renotinterestedin food," tour representatives are known to tell hoteliers...
...It is vandalizing Spain and corroding the charming manners and helpfulness of Spaniards —who are selling their birthright not for a mess of pottage but simply for a mess...
...There has even been talk of marking hooligans' passports distinctively, although they would surely be proud of, and compete for, the distinction...
...The British are Coming British diplomats are appalled to see their efforts to win Spanish friendship sabotaged by "lager-louts and tabloid tramps...
...The British Embassy thanked the Spanish authorities for "this generous and warm gesture...
...Stop me if I have already told you Robert Graves' anecdote about the girl he heard in a London bank talking to a friend about her holiday in San Antonio [Ibiza...
...Thatcherite orthodoxy perhaps, but a depressing admission that too many of these tourists are incapable of behaving decently unless someone cracks a whip...
...Generally, it is "Spain" they blame, rather than the hyping, skimping tour firms...
...They pick their package from abrochure...
...Inflation in the United Kingdom is expected to reduce by about 14 per cent the number of British visitors to Spain in 1990...
...asked the friend...
...Many Spaniards concede that only a small proportion of Brits are a nuisance, but add: "Even so, they're a much bigger proportion than the fraction of French and Germans who are troublesome...
...Margaret Thatcher, who waves an increasingly tattered law-andorder banner in every election, may perhaps be grateful to Spain for entertaining yobs who might otherwise return to the English resorts that were once the scene of annual battles between mods, rockers, skinheads, and various other sick fauna...
...Louts wearing indecent union-jack shorts, vomiting and fighting in the streets, sometimes even screwing in public with others cheering them on...
...Idon'tknow," saidthegirl, "we went by air...
...International intercourse is what makes the angels sing...
...Nothing significant, however, has been done...
...In September, 370 English tourists arrived in a Catalan resort to discover that their Birmingham tour firm was bankrupt and had not paid for their accommodations, food or return fares...
...Few know anything about the country they are going to...
...others are slyly lowermiddle or expertly bottom-of-the-barrel...
...Both men have worked devotedly to improve relations between Spain and Britain...
...So lower-than-middle packaged Brits are apt to be allotted the rooms with cockroaches, and served tired salads and leatherymeat...
...Where's that...
...Yet Spaniards remain, on the whole, decent people with civilized standards...
...Tourism is doing more than harming Anglo-Spanish relations...
...A few are reputed to trawl heavy drinkers (profitable because they eat little and sleep anywhere) and to offer bedroom surprises...
...Oddly, his London cousins forgot to come to La Coruna this year to commemorate the defeat, in 1589, of a much bigger English invasion force whose commanders were so incompetent that half their men were killed and a quarter deserted...
...they push up culinary standards, many are interested in art and folklore, one in five has studied Spanish...
...Catalan officials saved the tourists from hardship by paying all their bills...
...Look miserable...
...Contemplate all this, and you have a tabloid editor's idea of Paradise...
...Half the summer tourists arriving at Mallorca airport from the UK are drunk...
...Some tour firms cater to sedate middle-class folk...
...they're not interested in people or places, they just want a resort that is a sunnier, boozier version of Blackpool or Margate, serving the same junk food and beer...
...What's gone wrong with them...
...An English policeman, just back from Spain with his wife and daughters, told a reporter: "Spain's disgusting...
...When I read that, some years ago, I thought it unfair...
...People who enjoy their Spanish vacation are made to feel ashamed, perhaps abnormal...
...Both the Sun and Mirror advertise "holiday hotlines" on which readers can win fame by reporting personal horror stories...
...Well, there's intercourse and intercourse...
...The Pain in Spain In his novel Horse Under Water, Len Deighton has a British security officer inPortugal teil his team: "Pretend to be English tourists...
...Recently they reported Salou (Catalonia) to be "stricken" by a "typhoid epidemic"—because six Brits (out of the 200,000 tourists in the town) had intestinal troubles...
...The system gives tour firms enough financial clout to persuade hotels to cut prices and minimize amenities...
...Los ingleses have acquired a reputation in Spain for mindless violence, drunkenness, obscenity and delinquency...
...As in all such crowds, the lowest common denominator is apt to prevail, so raucous nerds, pugnacious louts and vomiting drunks have fouled up places that only a few years ago were delightful...
...Most of the Brits are transported and accommodated in herds by package-tour firms...
...Sadly, though, as Gordon Lennox' mission to Madrid comes to its end, one must report that he and Don Juan Carlos have failed...
...you're saying...
...Lord Nicholas Gordon Lennox is the kind of ambassador who makes diplomatic society respectable...
...Those 12 million French travel mostly in small groups...
...Deighton was on target, though...
...This prickliness derives less from the Gibraltar problem, which both royal families play down, than from the fact that since 1975 the annual flow of British tourists to Spain has doubled...
...Members of the British government declare year after year that "something must be done...
...Hold on...
...Add to these package-tour hazards the discomfort and anxiety many tourists suffer when, as seems to happen every year, air traffic between the UK and Spain is delayed by strikes...
...With the European Community preparing measures to oblige travel firms to observe higher standards, Britain's two biggest operators, Thomson and Intasun, have suddenly announced that they intend to ax about 1 million of what a London paper has called "their cheaper and nastier holidays...
...Stir in occasional accidents, drug-busts and disappearances (many of the more than 100,000 British teenagers who go missing every year surface in Spain...
...Providence may be arranging that...
...In 1988, 54 million tourists visited Spain...
Vol. 72 • November 1989 • No. 17
