A brief history of Torremolinos

Calle San Miguel. The tobacco shop on the left remains today, but the Quitapenas moved to the steps to the beach.

By Alfredo Bloy-Dawson

 ASK the average British person about Torremolinos and chances are they will compare it to Blackpool or the Costa Blanca’s Benidorm.
Few will associate it with the words chic or sophisticated. Fewer still will know French bombshell Brigitte Bardot once walked Calle San Miguel barefoot, or of how Frank Sinatra was once arrested here.
The bad reputation reached its peak in the late 1980s when the thousands of Union Jack-clad hooligans would cause chaos in the summer months, urinating in fountains, chanting football songs and generally being a menace to the police and local residents.
As the in summer destination for the under 30s moved to Ibiza and Mallorca, Torremolinos never really regained its popularity.
Anyone under 40 probably has few good memories of the place which has since settled for tourism comprised of families, pensioners and homosexuals (not that any of these are bad things, of course).
When I see teenagers walking around the town centre I am not sure if it is my imagination but they always seem to have a ‘why did we come here’ look on their faces, as if they had been victims of a practical joke or an over enthusiastic travel agent.

Calle San Miguel in Torremolinos July 2012. Little has changed.

The town centre IS ugly, and the growing number of shops which are closing or being turned into Chinos (Chinese-owned discount shops) here cannot be ignored.
Guide books describe it as “grotesque” warning readers it is best avoided entirely. Most websites with sections about Torremolinos are written by people who do not know it, simply regurgitating stereotypes, terms such as: tacky, concrete jungle, or overdeveloped.
‘The Rough Guide to Spain’ (2007 edition) – normally my favourite guidebook series – warns readers “The approach to Torremolinos – an easy thirty-minute ride on the electric train (cercanía) from Malaga – is a rather depressing business. There are half-a-dozen beaches, but it´s a drab soulless landscape of kitchenette apartments, new urbanizaciones and half-finished developments. ”
It adds: “to its enduring credit it certainly is different: a vast, grotesque parody of a seaside resort, which in its own kitschy was is fascinating.”
Criticism about the town is generally limited to its town centre and the main road of Montemar, as the seaside neighbourhoods of La Carihuela, Bajondillo, Playamar or Los Alamos have been well maintained and remain attractive.
Other typically Spanish neighbourhoods such as El Pinillo, Montemar Alto or El Calvario remain the same aside from the odd shopping centre or industrial estate. Not being by the seaside these areas were never really part of the mass development of the 70s and early 80s.
I felt compelled to find out if Torremolinos deserves its bad rap, or if on some level it deserves some respect.
Having grown up here in the 80s I thought I would draw on my memories and see how, and if, the town has evolved since, now that I have moved back to the town.
As one does these days I Googled ‘Torremolinos’ and I discovered two things: there is hardly anything online about the place in Spanish and practically nothing worth reading in English.
Obviously Wikipedia was to be ignored as a source of reliable information (apparently the famous Hotel Pez Espada opened in 1960 and 1959, both dates on the same Wiki page).

Same shot of Bajondillo and Playamar before construction started.

My searches kept coming back to one excellent Spanish website called aqueltorremolinos.com. Although an unappealing website, it contains a chronology of events which took place in Torremolinos from 1950-1975 taken from newspaper reports of the time.
The research by its author A. Carlos Blanco Cabrera is the only resource I could find worth a dime and it is thanks to him I was able to fill in the gaps and put the ducks in a row, as my mind had muddled all the events together.

Bajondillo with the Playamar towers in the distance.

The same are but taken from the other direction toward the rock.

What started as an article about Torremolinos grew and grew as each stone I turned I discovered a fascinating story which must be retold before it disappears altogether.

A rocket in my pocket

One such example of my fuzzy childhood memories involves a rocket, a prince and Playamar. Having lived in the mid 70s (aged 4 to 6) at the famous Playamar towers, which still dominate the skyline 50 years after they were built, I recalled a strange rocket sculpture by the edge of the complex.
Returning to the area recently I could not locate the rocket sculpture, figuring it had been demolished or was a fragment of my imagination.
During the research for this piece I discovered they were the two minarets (slender pillars of Islamic mosques) at the entrance to the massive hotel next door, the 4-star Hotel Principe Otoman.

Now called Principe Sol and run by the Melia hotel group, the Principe Otoman was built in 1973 by a colourful local businessman called Omar Halbaycin who had bought himself the title of ‘Ottoman Prince’.

Principe Otoman Pic. aqueltorremolinos.com

Halbaycin has started off with a hamburger restaurant in the Pasaje Pizarro in Torremolinos. He later purchased land in Los Alamos where the Clinica de Santa Elena and the Los Tres Caballos urbanization would be built in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Halbaycin liked to be refered to as Doctor Halbaycin, as he had a PhD.
As his local business empire grew so did his status within the high society of the time.
Years later he built the Principe Ottoman, at the time the 4-star hotel with the most number of hotel rooms in the town. Due to financial mismanagement Doctor Halbaycin bankrupted the companies he’d set up to build the hotel, leading to legal disputes with creditors, according to local Spanish daily Sur.
But even in the bankruptcy period there are fascinating tales. The man in charge of the hotel’s swimming pools, Francisco Santana, who called himself 'el comandante' sick of waiting for an appointment to claim his outstanding wages burst into Doctor Halbaycin’s office at the hotel carrying a pistol and according to press reports said “you are neither a prince, nor a doctor, nor anything. You are a hard faced man who has not given an injection in his life. So either you pay me what you owe me or I’ll shoot you.”
The Doctor’s pet lion cub started growling, but ‘el comandante’ punched the table breaking an ashtray and pointed the gun at the man and his lion.
‘El comandante’ claims the good doctor opened the safe hidden behind a painting in his office and paid him the 5 million pesetas he was owed. You couldn’t make it up.
What started as a comparison of the town from the 80s, my era, to now, led me to a fascinating journey back decades before my birth when the golden era of Torremolinos took place.
What one sees today in the town centre in particular are remnants or more accurately, remains, from four separate periods: the birth as a luxury celebrity resort in the 50s and early 60s; the hippies and mass tourism boom of the late 60s and into the 70s; and the slow decay as a resort experienced in the late 80s and 90s.
Tourism on the Costa del Sol was born here, perhaps surprisingly, decades before Dictator General Francisco Franco died in 1975 and with him was born a new democracy.
In fact it was General Francisco Franco who in April 1956 inaugurated the Torremolinos Golf Club which cost 5 million pesetas to build.

A weekly flight service between London and Malaga was lunched that same year by Horizon Holidays.

Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975.

Although little seems to have happened in the 90s and 00s, there were many years in the early days of Torremolinos notable for the amount of events which would mark the area for future generations. 

Swedish sensation

Torremolinos in the 60s became famous throughout Spain for the large number of young nubile Swedish girls who would spend their summers here drinving the strict Catholic gils green with envy and the men mad with lust.
Spanish men were mesmerized by these free-spirited sexy blondes.
This was depicted in several Spanish 'Carry On' style comedy films of the time such as 'Amor a la Española' starring Alfredo Landa.
It all started with the opening of the Swedish Summer School for teenage girls which opened in Torremolinos in 1954.

Pez Espada

It is impossible to ignore 1959 when the Costa del Sol’s first luxury hotel, the Pez Espada, opened its doors by the beach next to the Carihuela.
The manager guards the hotel’s famous Golden Book in his office. The book serves as testament to the hotel’s illustrious past, with photos and messages from its impressive list of high profile guests which includes Hollywood royalty, as well as actual royalty. 
More than five decades on it continues to trade, but having lost its 5-star rating it trades as a 4-star having also lost much of its international upmarket appeal. 
It seems doubtful that Torremolinos ever regain its title as a playground for the rich and famous.
Another memorable year, for several ‘firsts’ was 1963. 
It was the year legendary Costa del Sol magazine Lookout printed its first edition, priced at 10 pesetas, and the famous Pedro’s Bar-Restaurant in the town centre’s Plaza  started selling Fish and Chips for 35 pesetas. In 1963 apartments went on sale at the Eurosol buildings on the man coast road above where the Pez Espada hotel is. El Goloso creperie and hamburger bar opened in

Pedro's on the right was a hip joint located on Plaza Costa del Sol.

August in a passageway connecting the Plaza Costa del Sol with Plaza de la Gamba Alegre.
The following year brought about another singular event. In September 1964 US singer Frank Sinatra’s Torremolinos break is cut short after he is arrested and fined 25,000 pesetas over a brawl involving a journalist, a female Cuban singer and Sinatra’s bodyguards at the Hotel Pez Espada.
At the time of writing this Spain is gripped by economic turmoil, the country deep in double dip recession.
One in four people are unemployed (one in three in Andalucia), new PM Rajoy’s education and healthcare cuts are leading to mass protesting. Billions of euros are being diverted to bail out the nation’s troubled banks crippled by surplus overpriced housing stocks acquired during the housing boom of the mid 90s.
But the Coast has recovered from these property bubbles before.
In August 1974 local headlines described how some real eastate companies were reporting not having sold a single property in six months. 
Bosses of 23 hotels – half of them in Torremolinos – asked for permission to close off season, as they are unable to make ends meet. Banks admit to having liquidity problems and effectively stop giving credit. Construction companies say there is no money and in December 1974 report they have been forced to lay off 12,500 workers. 
Property developer Sofico closes, leaving thousands of customers who had invested in apartments from Torremolinos to Estepona without their money and 1,500 staff jobless. During this crisis, several tour operators go bust.
Meanwhile, problems within the hotel sector continued into 1977 when in May hundreds of workers from hotels in Torremolinos and the Costa del Sol went on strike over work conditions. The strike would continue until mid August.
That same month of May the 149 staff at the then 5-star Hotel Pez Espada called for strike action over four and a half million pesetas in wages owed to them. 
That July hotel workers at the nearby Amargua held protests over layoffs at the establishment.
In October1977 in a bid to cut costs during the slump tourism, a dozen hotels requested permission to close for the winter season. These included Hotels Melia Torremolinos, Riviera, Jorge V, Gol Guadalmina, Tropicana, Blásón, Sido-Sol, Samba, San Miguel and Lloyd. It was expected many more would do the same.
The following April, 1978 scores of catering sector staff from the Coast’s numerous bars, clubs and restaurants went on strike.
Despite the cyclical nature of Torremolinos, my research so far suggests that if we do not keep a record of its modern history, no-one else will, and Torroles will be forced to spend the rest of its years as that place that had all those British hooligans in the 80s.

If I get enough material, I will look into publishing it in a small book format and we can all keep a copy for posperity. If this experiment succeeds Benalmadena (Jules? Chalet?) willl be next, then Fuengirola (Crazy Daisy anyone?)...
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Enjoy, and please help with this unfolding story
Alfredo