If you have occasion to spend two weeks in Malaga, as I did recently, you will have the opportunity to take many cultural excursions to the nearby glories of Andalucia. You can visit Seville, once the proudest city in Spain. You can visit Granada and the Alhambra, the last stronghold of Moorish Andalucia. You can visit the port of Cadiz, from where Columbus set sail. Or you can do as I did, and take a day trip to Torremolinos, famed home of 70s package tours and high-rise hotels, where every summer hundreds of thousands of English and German tourists plank their towels on the beach and spend their days stocking up on lager and sunburn.
Torremolinos makes for a very enjoyable day out if you go with an appropriate sense of irony, and my Dutch-speaking friends and I arrived there in a suitably irreverent mood. The square outside the train station was clean and even a bit tasteful, so we promptly headed down to beach level, where we came across a sign for "the worst Irish pub in the world". This was exactly the kind of thing we were looking for -- though given the general standard of Irish pubs, it was quite an extravagant claim. And alas, it proved to be impossible to live up to, for while the place got the darkness and the decor right, it was far from the worst Irish pub I've seen, if only because it wasn't in Ireland and full of Irish people.
Instead, we settled into a cafe on the seafront and began the earnest business of quietly mocking the passers-by. There's something about the midday sun which compels the corpulent, red-faced Anglo-Saxon to disrobe (at a time when natives wisely cover up and head for the shade), thus exposing the casual viewer to sights that rightly belong in an R-rated movie. We were passed by a succession of sun-blistered shoulders, hairy backs, beer bellies, and sagging arses; breasts that had seepage instead of cleavage, thighs that looked like fat chorizo sausages left out in the sun, and hips so wide and sticking out at so acute an angle that their owners were not pear-shaped, but pyramid-shaped.
In the midst of such hilarious ugliness, I was surprised that it took so long for the first mullet to appear, but when it did it was a classic: permed and dyed, and accompanied by an expanse of mustache of the like not seen since Giorgio Moroder donated his lip-hair to science in 1979. Mulletman completed the picture with a medallion that shone out from his chest hair, a vast belly of solid lager, and an indignant stare reminiscent of a small pampered bulldog on guard duty.
Enjoyable as it was, we couldn't spend all day laughing at the physical shortcomings of the tourists, and eventually it was time for me to expose my own Adonis-like physique and head for a swim. The sand in Torremolinos beach is disappointing, consisting of coarse brown grains that turn into stones at water level. In the sea, the ground drops off at a gradient of 1 in 2, and after a few steps you're in deep, deep water. After being battered by a couple of waves, we decided to leave and shower off. At the shower we encountered another Torremolinos cliche: a local sleazebag on the pull, who assured my friend (correctly) that she was "molto, molto beautiful". Something, incidentally, which couldn't be said of the topless woman who decided to take a dip just as I was leaving. At the sight of this sagging creature advancing towards me, the only thought in my head was molto, molto bolto.
After drying off, we climbed back up the streets to the main square, streets which could be quite beautiful if they weren't full of shops selling trash: "Makin' bacon" T-shirts, fake leopardskin sunglasses, towels with stick figures doing the Kama Sutra. These winding, narrow, stepped streets lead up the side of a rugged coastal rock formation, which attractively bursts through in places. Lugging a beer belly up the steps can be thirsty work, so a number of cafes are dotted among the trash shops, and this made our thoughts turn towards food.
Spanish food might well be my favourite of the world's cuisines, and by that stage I had gone on several delicious tapas tours of Malaga; but this was Torremolinos and we wanted to debase ourselves. And so, the goal of the evening was not tapas, but crapas. We deliberately avoided the nice places (of which there were surprisingly many) and headed for the expat haunts, such as an English pub where every table had a towel to mop up the lager spill, and then, to the delight of my friends, a "Nederlands Eetcafe" where we had very attentive service. This place boasted a menu with all your deep-fried meat-related fritkot favourites, from frikadel to bitteballen, which are related to meat in the sense that if you go back about 300 million years, you find a common ancestor. Somewhere along the way we lost our concentration and stopped to have some very nice fish tapas in a bar with no English menu. Not even the enormous seafood pizza I had afterwards could take the inadvertently pleasant taste away.
We got a free English-language newspaper for little-England expats, which was full of Daily Mail style junk and "imagine my surprise" letters from people with names like Mrs. Colin Pilkington. But truth be told, I had been surprised at the number of actual Spanish holidaymakers in Torremolinos, having expected the place to be carpeted with Northern Europeans. It turns out that we had just been looking in the wrong area. While seeking a Dutch party that had been advertised by plane, we came to a place that had one expat bar after another, "The Red Lion" next to "Der Schnitzel Stube" next to "Oma 1". (Though the maybe the latter was actually Spanish.)
Most tourist guidebooks lament the existence of the Torremolinos resort, but I'm not sure I'd like to roll back time to when it was a fishing village on a rocky coastline. I found it impossible to hate the place, and even found it grudgingly likeable. In a way, it's reassuring that such a concentration of trashiness exists in Europe, if only because it's well-contained and unlikely to spread anywhere else. And unlike the kitschy mini-Europe of Disneyland, there's something organic about Torremolinos. It's a kitschy mini-Europe that expanded naturally, because visiting people liked it so much that they stayed and opened cafes.
And it's not hard to see why people would want to stay there. Yesterday, as I was cycling home in the freezing rain (in mid-August), it struck me that just a few nights earlier, I was sitting, in shorts and sandals, at a warm Mediterranean beach watching the moon rise over the sea. In southern Spain, no matter how trashy your surroundings, that irresisitible climate seems to triumph over everything.