Sun, Sand, and Social Distancing

摘要

Few places are as tied to mass tourism as the Spanish resort town of Benidorm. It's often dubbed the birthplace of package tours, and on a typical summer day its broad beaches, towering hotels, and palm-lined promenades are jammed with visitors seeking sun and surf. This year it's been more about silence and social distance. , So in mid-July, as Ramon Martinez watched the first mask-clad guests enter his 320-room Hotel Presidente after four months of lockdown, he was overwhelmed with emotion-akin to what he imagines locals felt when the first foreign tourists arrived in the 1950s. "I told the staff, 'This is incredible,'" Martinez says. "It was a special moment." For Martinez and other hoteliers in the city, the corona-virus epidemic augurs change almost as dramatic as those early days, when Generalissimo Francisco Franco ruled the country and Benidorm was little more than a village. The city today gets about 4 million visitors a year, often flying in on packed budget airliners, sunbathing towel-to-towel, and filling clubs and bars to drink, dance, and flirt into the wee hours. That's not a business model that works during a pandemic, says Leire Bilbao, director of the city's tourist board. "If you don't do things right during a crisis," she says, "when the crisis has passed, you might be a place where people don't want to go."