Ghosts of Spain (19 page)

Eventually, however, Gil was banned from public office. His reaction was to step back into the shadows and appoint others to represent him. One of these, Julián Muñoz, eventually rebelled. Muñoz had ambitions to become a Jesús Gil himself. He was
ousted
in a town hall rebellion fixed by Gil in which the political parties of those involved seemed to have nothing to do with the way they voted. Some claimed that a rogue British financier, who fled
London
in the 1970s and made millions on Marbella real estate, was behind it all.

One hot summer’s night, I turned on the television set to find Gil and Muñoz involved in their final showdown. This was not being conducted on a politics or news programme but on
Salsa
Rosa
. This late-night TV show is normally devoted, loudly and argumentatively, to updating its viewers on the sex lives, affairs of the heart, broken friendships and plastic surgery of second-rate celebrities. Spain has no muck-raking tabloid press. There is no equivalent to Britain’s
Sun
or Germany’s
Bild
. But there are at least half a dozen of these shows on Spanish television. A similar number of so-called
prensa rosa
, or ‘pink press’, magazines are for sale on the news-stands. Here the cheque-book confessions of those famous for being famous are gone over in minute and, often, imaginary detail amid shouted bouts of accusation and counter-accusation. All the so-called ‘journalists’ on this
particular
programme really wanted to know was whether the reason for Gil’s decision to oust Muñoz had been that he could not stand his girlfriend, the folkloric singer and gay icon Isabel Pantoja. She had previously been known as ‘the widow of Spain’ after her
former
husband, the matador Paquirri, was gored to death by a fighting bull. But the battle soon got nastier than that. ‘You are a
bandido
,’ shouted Gil. ‘You are a liar and cheat,’ spat Muñoz. ‘They are both probably right,’ commented
El Mundo
newspaper the next morning.

Gil’s Marbella is often held up as an example of the perfection of a system of corruption that is a temptation to all Spanish town halls. Most land needs to be reclassified from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ before it can be built on. The power to do that rests with the town
hall, which raises a tax on the new buildings and sells licences. Much building land is, anyway, owned by town halls themselves. They are now so dependent on income gained from construction that, if they stopped building, some would lose between fifty and sixty per cent of their income. There may also be a second,
underhand
tax. This is the one that must be paid to the mayor, the councillor in charge of urban planning, their political party, their pet project, their wife, children,
testaferro
(front man) or whoever. Nobody can say, for sure, how often this tax is raised. Suspicious Spaniards assume it to be commonplace. If that is really so, then an unbreakable cycle is formed. The personal and political
interests
of both the developer and the politician meet, as do the spending habits (and funding) of the town hall. All they need to do is keep on building.

Stand on the busy beachfront in Marbella, or anywhere along the Costa del Sol, and this soon becomes apparent. The beachside development is moving rapidly up the hills, devouring everything in its path as the chain of cement joins up down the coast. Year after year I have watched the growth and seen the last few islands of green along the coast disappear. Towns have been joined together, like some giant dot-to-dot drawing, by lines of
apartment
blocks. Where the beach is already blocked, there has been a steady march inland.

The voices of Spain’s environmentalists, meanwhile, are drowned out by the sound of cement mixers and pile-drivers. Golf courses have become the latest drain on already scarce water resources. Some eighty-nine of these are projected along the
costas
over the next five years. Each will consume the water equivalent of a town of twelve thousand people, according to the environmentalists.

The building boom is fuelled, in part, by the proceeds of the drug trade with nearby Morocco and, further afield, with
Colombia
. A recent 250-million-euro police operation against
money-laundering
saw entire
urbanizaciones
confiscated by the courts.

The result of the boom is a brand new Mediterranean
megalopolis
, a single stretch of building extending down the coast for a hundred miles, from Nerja in the east to Sotogrande in the west.
Although 1.2 million people formally live on the Costa del Sol, there are actually believed to be some 3 million residents. Many are foreigners with few interests beyond their own house, the golf course and a handful of friends of the same nationality. There is something very American about this car-dependent
ribbon
of growth as it defies you, like a small Los Angeles, to
discover
its centre. If it continues adding, as it currently does, almost fifty thousand houses and apartments a year, it will double its population once more in fifteen to twenty years. There are even predictions that the Costa del Sol megalopolis will, eventually, become Spain’s largest city. Unfortunately, as the traffic jams show, it is not something that has been planned for.

Jesús Gil is by no means the only corrupt politician to have
disgraced
these climes. The clearest proof of a link between drug money, politics and
costas
construction came when the Socialist mayor of Estepona, Antonio Caba, was sentenced to five years in jail for helping launder the money of a Turkish heroin-trafficking syndicate. Caba, elected on the promise of cleaning up the alleged corruption of a previous mayor, had, in his private lawyer’s
practice
, helped Turkish drug smuggler Levent Ucler launder more than one million pounds through local real estate. Ucler, at the time, was also under investigation for the murder of his own wife. Little surprise, then, that the voters of Estepona, at one stage, turned to Jesus Gil’s GIL party.

Figures for the amount of black cash being laundered in the
costas
’ on-off construction booms are impossible to calculate. It includes not just ‘white’ cocaine and hashish money, but also the ‘grey’ money of small European businessmen who buy houses with cash never declared to their own tax authorities. It would be nice to think that all this money, wherever it came from, trickled down to the people of the Costa del Sol. But it circulates, instead, in the upper spheres of developers, construction magnates and the comparatively rich, northern European buyers. ‘One wonders how a province with the highest unemployment rates and one of the lowest incomes per capita in the country can have the highest rate of business societies per 1,000 inhabitants and a growth of
1,800 per cent in the construction of new private housing in the last five years,’ a recent university study asked out loud. The study, produced by a brave few individuals at Málaga University’s
criminology
institute, pointed out that the
costas
were on a ladder of corruption. If nothing was done, they warned, it could lead to the creation of an established mafia economy.

Their report was, however, greeted with almost total silence. Nothing has been done to end the dependency of town halls on builders and, ultimately, on their clients – the tourists. Indeed, questioning tourism in any way at all is met with almost total incomprehension. To ask a Costa del Sol politician whether they approve or disapprove of tourism and construction is to ask a
villager
in the sierras of nearby Jaén or Córdoba whether they approve or disapprove of olive trees.

At the provincial police headquarters in Málaga I went to see Chief Inspector Fernando Vives, the man who had been searching Francisco Calero’s flat when he hurled himself from the rooftop. Vives headed a team of just eight police officers whose job it was to tackle financial crime on the Costa del Sol. ‘It is like fighting an army of elephants with a few ants,’ he admitted. Some major money-laundering busts since we met suggest either that his ants are working remarkably hard, or that their numbers have been boosted. The impression remains, however, that only the tip of the iceberg has been dealt with.

Vives was a sensitive cop. ‘All you can see along the coast are cranes and more cranes. A large part of that money comes from illegal earnings,’ he says. ‘The Costa’s geography – its hills and woodlands – are being destroyed. Nobody imagined it would be like this.’

Vives said the hashish traffic from Morocco alone was at about 350 tonnes a year. The presence of Gibraltar, with twice as many offshore companies as its 29,000 residents, had helped create the opportunities for crime and corruption. The same routes, and the same international gangs, are increasingly turning to cocaine.

The problem is made worse by British and other expatriate
residents
. Most cannot be bothered to register as citizens of their
new home towns, robbing the area of other funds awarded on the basis of how many people live there. Some 300,000 Britons are estimated to live here. That makes this Britain’s fourteenth-largest ‘city’, larger than, for example, Cardiff, Belfast, Southampton or Bradford. However, fewer than one in ten British residents are registered.
Costa
corruption is as much the result of those who come here, enjoy the Spanish weather and hospitality but refuse to accept any responsibility for the place they live in, as it is of crooked politicians and construction companies.

The
Costa
traffic jam seemed so interminable, that I decided to give up on my attempt to reach Málaga on the coastal road. I turned around. I eventually joined, instead, an even worse jam on the motorway that has been sliced through the hills a couple of miles inland. First, however, I decided to try to find a
shortcut
through one of the
urbanizaciones
whose often gated and guarded entrances are strung along this road. It was a baffling experience. I recognised little that was Spanish here, except the gardens overflowing with bougainvillea and oleander. The array of architectural styles on display was bewildering. There were Moorish palaces, huge great Basque
caserios
, Mexican
haciendas
, rows of nondescript three-storey terraced hutches, gleaming glass and stainless steel modern apartment blocks, low-slung bungalows and wood-built houses straight out of the Swedish forests or the Canadian prairie. American-style
condominiums
, and golf courses, were sprouting up in the
surrounding
countryside. This, one visiting American journalist observed, was a place ‘whose gaudy architecture makes Beverly Hills look staid’.

I felt lost. It was not just because I could not find a way back out of this maze – which turned out to have only one entrance,
preventing
any through road spoiling the residents’ peace while
making
no contribution to unsnarling the chaos on the coastal road. Eventually, I decided that I was not in Spain any more. This was really the outer suburbs of a coastal city in Florida, Australia or any of the white-dominated suburbs along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. It was, essentially, a new place. It had been invented
out of nothing and answered to nothing more than its residents’ desire to live a life of leisure.

Spain is a country of small, tightly packed towns, cities and villages. Spaniards like to live piled up on top of one another. Their natural meeting place is the crowded street, the busy bar or the plaza. It is a life of close physical contact, of loud, sociable
bustle
. Benidorm, at least, has that. But here the only place people can be seen, tanned and blonde, is in their cars, as they head for the tennis club, the golf course or the out-of-town shopping centre, the new Spanish malls. Even the narrow beach, although busy, seems to be a minority interest. Its role has been replaced by tens of thousands of swimming pools – adding to growing problems with water.

This, however, is the new model for Spanish tourism, and not just on the Costa del Sol. Package tourism, the gold mine on which Benidorm was founded, is giving way to budget airlines and on-line booking of private villas. The money that changes hands often does not even come to Spain or pay a tax to help build the roads or water recycling plants. The
urbanizaciones
, some expensive, some full of hurriedly put up, shoddy ‘villas’, are sprouting up from Majorca to Marbella, from Torremolinos to Torrevieja. Many are ghost towns in winter, their restaurants and shops closed and their houses barred up.

In Benidorm, the editor of the English-language daily
newspaper,
the
Costa Blanca News
, told me that a friend of his had gone house-hunting to a new
urbanización
in a nearby town. He saw a man working in his garden and stopped to talk to him. The man turned out to be English. ‘Are there many foreigners here, then?’ the friend asked. ‘No, not really. There is one Norwegian, but the rest of us are British,’ came the answer. It had not occurred to him that British, in Spain, meant foreign.

I find the package holiday tourist at Benidorm, or the drunken 18–30 revellers battling their way up and down the streets of Ibiza’s San Antonio district easier to understand than these new, semi-permanent immigrants to the
costas
. I know package
holidaymakers
are here for the fun, for cheap booze, to watch their
kids play with buckets and spades and to shed their normal skin for a while or, at least, to change its colour. They seek a temporary transformation, a chance to forget the humdrum of their normal lives.

But the residents of the
urbanizaciones
feel to me like a different tribe, as strange as the Visigoths, the Moors or the Vandals must have been when they first arrived on the Iberian peninsula. I realise there is an element of possessiveness, even arrogance, in this. Having, however, made repeated attempts, and repeated
failures
, at understanding this tribe, I eventually turned to someone better equipped for interpreting the social structures, belief
systems
and rituals of other peoples – an anthropologist.