Benidorm, 2000

Rising between the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of the Costa Blanca, Benidorm is one of Europe’s most distinctive urban landscapes. During the second half of the twentieth century, a small fishing town was transformed into a dense vertical city built almost entirely around tourism.

Photographed in 2000 using a Sinar 4×5 inch large-format camera, this series was produced through a slow and deliberate working process. Each photograph required careful preparation, observation and composition, an approach that contrasts with the speed and transience often associated with tourism itself.

Rather than focusing on tourism as spectacle, the photographs examine the relationship between people, architecture and leisure in a place where everyday life unfolds on an exceptional scale. Tower blocks line the beaches, creating an urban skyline more commonly associated with major metropolitan centres than with a seaside resort.

Visitors, residents, apartment towers, beaches and public spaces merge into a landscape that blurs the boundaries between urban life and recreation. The sea and the surrounding mountains provide a dramatic backdrop to a city that appears both improbable and inevitable.

The images reveal Benidorm as a place of contrasts: density and openness, nature and construction, individuality and collective experience. Viewed through the slow and meticulous process of large-format photography, the city emerges not as a caricature of mass tourism but as a unique urban experiment shaped by geography, economics and human desire.

More than a tourist destination, Benidorm can be seen as one of the most successful and enduring examples of high-density urban development on the Mediterranean coast.