Corfu 1984, George’s Boat and Water Skiing

“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself”             Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

After three days we returned the car and went back to the routine of the first week with long days around the swimming pool, sunset drinks on the hotel terrace and seeking out different tavernas for evening meals.  Some days when we tired of the pool we visited the scruffy beach which was across a busy main road and through a gloomy underpass, which we rarely used, preferring instead to take our chances against the traffic.

Actually the sand was nice enough, soft and golden, but the place was full of activities and games and was just the sort of beach that these days I would go out of my way to avoid.  One day we did join in and Richard and I went out to sea behind a motor boat being dragged along on water skies. 

I had done this before but only on a freezing cold quarry at Stoney Cove in Leicestershire and doing it on the warm blue Ionian Sea was much, much better and I surprised myself, and everyone else, by being able to keep upright for most of the fifteen minute ride.

Towards the end of the fortnight we went on a day trip which turned out to be one of the highlights of the holiday, a full day on a Greek boat, with a Greek skipper and plenty of alcohol.

This was George’s boat and at mid morning we joined about thirty other holiday makers when we arrived at the concrete quayside opposite the hotel and were welcomed on board by George himself, a man with a big smile and a flamboyant sense of humour who worked hard to get us all to enjoy ourselves before casting off and steering the brightly coloured boat with the steady rhythm of its chugging diesel engine away from Corfu and out into the Ionian Sea.

As soon as George had completed the tricky bits and negotiated his way out of the harbour the fun began when the wine was opened and passed around and drunk from plastic cups and he began an amusing narrative and a stream of jokes, which were corny to begin with but got ruder as the day progressed.

Eventually someone had to be the first to use the on deck toilet which was located within a sort of canvas modesty tube and this was the moment George was waiting for because as soon as they were inside he scooped up a bucket of sea water and then to everyone’s amusement (except the young girl in the loo) he poured it through the open top and drenched her.  Her shrieks could probably be heard on the mainland and the whole boat was in fits of laughter.

After this there was no stopping George and his next party trick was to scoop up more water and then discharge this over unsuspecting people minding their own business and sunbathing on pedalos bobbing gently on the water.  HELLOOO! he shouted just as he emptied the bucket load all over them.  Some thought it was funny but some, it has to be said,  didn’t share the joke.  Everyone on board found this hilarious and encouraged George to repeat it over and again at every opportunity.

George took us first to a remote beach that was inaccessible from the land and he dropped anchor and invited us to jump from the prow of the boat into the warm crystal clear water below and we stayed there for a while swimming and diving and then sitting on deck in the sunshine drinking more wine.  After the swimming break we set off again for a stop at a small village for a barbeque lunch of fish and salad and yet more local wine.  It wasn’t the best wine I’ve ever tasted but sitting by the water with a cool breeze rippling the sea and the table cloths it was delightful and we could easily have stayed much longer than the time allocated and before we were really ready we had to set off on the journey back with more wine, more japes and a thoroughly good time.

Eventually the fortnight and an idyllic holiday came to an inevitable end and we had to reluctantly leave Corfu.  It had been an excellent holiday, perfect weather, Greek beer called Fix, Ouzo, Retsina, Moussaka and Greek salads.  Lovely people, good sightseeing and the best boat trip I have ever been on even now.

I have now been back to Corfu and I will tell you about that soon, I have been twice to Cephalonia which is similar but my favourite Greek islands are really the Cyclades and I have generally chosen to travel there instead.

I’ve googled and checked and 25 years later George’s boat is still running:

George’s-boat-corfu

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Some more of my boat journeys recorded in the journal:

Malta Tony-Oki-Koki

Rowing Boat on Lake Bled in Slovenia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Croatia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Wales

Gondola Ride in Venice

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Corfu 1984, A Jeep Ride Around The Island

Corfu: ”this brilliant little speck of an island in the Ionian”                           Lawrence Durrell – ‘Prospero’s Cell’

In the middle of the holiday we hired a flame red open top jeep for three days and set about visiting other parts of the island.  Perama is just about right in the centre of the island so this was a good place to begin the day trips out.  On the first day we went north bypassing Corfu town on the way and driving along the main island road along the eastern side of the island through the seaside towns of Gouvia, Dassia, Ipsos and Pyrgi, stopping frequently and finally arriving at the town of Kassiopi.

This maybe where, according to legend, the Ancient Greek hero Odysseus stopped for a while, or where the Roman Emperor Tiberius stopped for a while or where Richard the Lionheart stopped for a while but the heritage didn’t matter to us today as we had lunch under the shade of massive plane trees and far more water melon than we really needed and after walking around the pleasant little harbour spent the long hot afternoon on a beach just outside the village.

On the way back we bought some wine for just a few drachmas from an old lady, dressed all in black, who was selling home grown produce by the side of the road but when we got back and tried it wasn’t that good so we left it and went to the hotel bar for a beer instead.

On the second day we drove north-west over the mountain spine and through some of the most attractive scenery of the island first to Roda and then to the village of Sidari, which has red rocks softly eroded into unusual sand sculptures and nice beaches.  In 1984 Sidari was a quiet, almost remote place, with a dusty main street with only a handful of tavernas and shops off the main road but today it is one of the liveliest places on the island and a favourite with youngsters.

After a walk around Sidari we used the narrow minor roads of this part of the island and drove to what some claim to be the most picturesque part of the island, the town and bays of Paleokastritsia and best described by Lawrence Durrell:  ”the little bay lies in a trance, drugged with its own extraordinary perfection – a conspiracy of light, air, blue sea and cypresses”.   As we drove high along the side of the mountain Paleokastritsia suddenly came into view and looking down over the green fringed beaches and looping ribbons of sand we were inclined to agree with him.  Actually this was the best of Paleokastritsia because down in the village the scenery didn’t really compare with the elevated panorama and we found it rather fragmented and disappointing.

On the final day of car hire we drove south driving first through the infamous resort of Benitses, which at ten o’clock in the morning was still recovering from the night before and didn’t live up to its dangerous reputation at all, no dead bodies or burnt out cars and we drove through entirely without incident.  For the first part of the journey the road followed the coast but then went inland and cut through the pine trees of the interior as it bisected the narrow southern part of the island on the way to the fishing village and tiny port of Kavos at the very bottom of the island where we stayed for lunch and enjoyed the lazy streets of the town and the ambiance of the harbour.

In the afternoon we visited the Achilleion at Gastouri, in between Perama and Benitses, which is a casino and a museum now but was once a summer Palace built in 1890 by the Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was a curious woman obsessed with the classical Homeric hero Achilles and with all things beautiful (including herself apparently).  The Palace, with the neoclassical Greek statues that surround it, is a monument to platonic romanticism and escapism and is filled with paintings and statues of Achilles, both in the main hall and in the gardens, depicting the scenes of the Trojan War.

The dazzling white Palace has a wedding cake like appearance and the beautiful Imperial gardens on the hill look over the surrounding green hill crests and valleys and the azure blue Ionian Sea.

The centre piece of the gardens is a marble statue on a high pedestal, of the mortally wounded Achilles wearing only a simple cloth and an ancient Greek hoplite helmet.  This statue was created by German sculptor Ernst Gustav Herter and the hero is presented devoid of rank or status, and seems notably human though heroic, as he is forever trying to pull the arrow shot by Paris from his heel.  His classically depicted face is full of pain and he gazes skyward, as if to seek help from Olympus.

In contrast, at the great staircase in the main hall is a giant painting of the triumphant Achilles full of pride.  Dressed in full royal military regalia and erect on his racing chariot, he pulls the lifeless body of Hector of Troy in front of the stunned crowd watching helplessly from inside the walls of the Trojan citadel.

In 1898 at the age of sixty the Empress was assassinated when she was stabbed by an anarchist whilst walking in a park in Geneva, Switzerland.  After her death the palace was sold to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II who also liked to take summer holidays on Corfu and later it was acquired by the Greek State who converted it into a museum.

It is a beautiful place with grand sweeping gardens befitting royal ownership and we enjoyed the visit and even went back later to see the sunset from the Kaiser’s chair, which is an area at the highest point in the gardens where Wilhelm would go in the evening to enjoy the end of the day.

Corfu 1984, Perama and Corfu Town

“The Greek Earth opens before me like the Book of Revelations….The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being.”  Henry Miller – ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’                           

I visited the Greek island of Corfu in the summer of 1984 and this was my second visit to Greece in a short time following a holiday on the island of Kos the previous year. but this was my defining visit because this was when I realised that I was in love with the Greek Islands.

Corfu is the second largest of the Ionian Islands after Cephalonia which are situated to the east of the mainland and are more similar in appearance to the Croatian islands to the north than to the Cyclades or the Dodecanese.  The northern part lies off the coast of Albania, from which it is separated by straits varying from three to twenty-three kilometres wide, while its southern coast lies off the coast of Thesprotia, Greece.

In the 1980s Corfu was expanding rapidly as a tourist destination and was acquiring a reputation as a party island and magnet for badly behaving British tourists on boozy Club 18-30 holidays who were drawn in the main to the hedonistic town of Benitses which was well known for heavy drinking, wild behaviour and street fighting.  There was a story at the time that even the island police were frightened to go in there after dark but I am not sure if this was really true.

We were staying at a modern hotel complex called the Aeolos Beach Hotel about ten kilometres north of Benitses at the resort of Perama, which was only a short distance from the capital Kerkyra and the airport.  So close to the airport in fact that we could sit and watch the aircraft in the final seconds of descent and imminent landing which kept dad amused for the entire fortnight.

The hotel was an unattractive concrete structure with a main building with restaurant, bar and shops and the accommodation was in a string of bedroom blocks that were located amongst pretty bougainvillea shrubs in the large hotel gardens.  It was in quite a good spot, elevated and with good views over the sea and across to Albania and overlooking Pontikonisi Island, the home of the monastery of Pantokrator whose white staircase resembles (from afar) a mouse’s tail and is the reason the island acquired its popular name of Mouse Island from this perceived architectural quirk.

We didn’t stray far from the hotel for the first few days and enjoyed lazy times in the hot sun sitting on the hotel terrace and taking frequent cool-off dips in the big swimming pool.  At lunch time we would wander off in search of a taverna for Greek salad, do nothing in the afternoon and in the evenings spend a few moments on the first floor terrace bar with a beer watching the sun go down before finding somewhere nearby for evening meal.

After a few days of lethargic inactivity we inevitably began to get restless so it was time to get out and about and our first excursion was a bus ride into the capital.  Due to its geographical position Corfu has had a turbulent history and has entertained many foreign rulers, the Romans, the Venetians, Ottoman Turks, French and British before eventual unification with modern Greece in 1864.  A legacy of these struggles is demonstrated in the number of castles and fortresses punctuating strategic locations across the island. Two of these castles enclose the capital, which is the only city in Greece to be surrounded in such a way and as a result has been officially declared a Kastropolis (Castle city) by the Greek Government.

The old town of Corfu with its pastel-hued, multi-storey Venetian styled shuttered buildings, peaceful squares and  elegant arcades was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2007 and stands on the broad part of a peninsula at the end of which the old Venetian citadel is cut off by a natural gully with a seawater moat.  Having been developed within the confines of the fortifications the old town is a labyrinth of narrow cobblestoned streets, which, as we walked through them were sometimes hard work as they follow the gentle irregularities of the ground.  Except for the uneven surface it was quite safe however because most of the streets are just too narrow for modern vehicular traffic.

Corfu town is an eclectic mix of pretty streets and unappealing modern buildings and this is because sadly a lot of the town was destroyed in the Second-World-War when the Luftwaffe bombed Corfu as they grasped control from the Italian invaders following Italy’s surrender to the Allies but we enjoyed it anyway and walked around the old town with its elegant Venetian style mansions, the busy marina with its collection of boats and visited the cricket pitch, which is a quirky legacy of fifty years of British rule from 1814 to 1864 and where matches are still played today.

I don’t suppose many people would expect to find cricket being played in Greece but it was introduced in Corfu in April 1823 when a match was played between the British Navy and the local Army garrison. The Hellenic Cricket Federation was founded a hundred and seventy years later in 1996 when Greece became a member of the European Cricket Council and an affiliate member of the International Cricket Council.  There are now twenty-one cricket clubs in Greece, thirteen of which are based in Corfu and Greece competes annually in the European Cricket Championship despite being banned for a year in 2008 for cheating.

Venice, An Expensive Gondola Ride

“The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty feet long and is narrow and deep like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like the horns of a crescent…. The bow is ornamented with a battle axe attachment that threatens to cut passing boats in two.”                                                                                                 Mark Twain – ‘The Innocents Abroad’

In 2003 I visited Venice for the second time and  took a ride through the canals in a gondola.  At €80 for fifty minutes it was horrifically expensive of course but it was something that had to be done.  To be fair to the gondoliers, they invest a great deal in their boats, about €20,000 for a traditional hand-built wooden gondola with a life expectancy of about twenty years. They need to earn the bulk of their annual income in a few short tourist months and the cost of living is high in Venice because it is an expensive city in one of Italy’s wealthiest provinces.

Close to our hotel, the Locanda Orseola on the Orseola canal, there was a sort of gondola terminus where rows of boats and their rowers were waiting for business.  We selected a sleek black one (actually like a Ford Model T they are all black) with elaborate paintings on the interior and black velvet seats with purple brocade and a gondolier in traditional black and white hooped shirt and straw hat with a red ribbon and after we had settled into our seats we set off into the labyrinth of tiny canals slipping quietly through the water as the gondolier expertly paddled his way through the pea green waters.  The oar (or rèmo) is held in an oar lock known as a fórcola which is a critical component of the boat with a complicated shape allowing several positions of the oar for slow forward rowing, powerful forward rowing, turning, slowing down, rowing backwards, and stopping.

The profession of gondolier is controlled by a guild, which issues a limited number of licenses granted after periods of training and apprenticeship, and a major comprehensive exam which tests knowledge of Venetian history and landmarks, foreign language skills, and practical skills in handling the gondola typically necessary in the tight spaces of Venetian canals.

Our friendly guide took us first through some narrow back canals and at a blind bend collided with another going in the other direction and then we joined a gondola jam as he manoeuvered into a busier waterway heading for the Grand Canal.  The small canals were curiously quiet without pavements or people as we passed by the back doors of mansions, shops and restaurants but the main canals were busier lined with cafés and restaurants and with crowds of people crossing the narrow bridges every few metres or so.

At water level there was a  different perspective to the buildings and down here we could see the exposed brickwork and the crumbling pastel coloured stucco giving in to the corrosive power of the waters of the lagoon as the relentless assault of the sea gnaws and gouges away at the infrastructure of the city grinding away the brickwork and teasing away the mortar.

Everything looks decrepit and aged but appearances can be deceptive because it turns out that there is a very good reason for this.  There is a city law that requires residents to use only approved paint products that are specially prepared to show signs of aging very soon after application to preserve the essential ambiance of the city.

Our boat was in perfect condition and lovingly cared for from aft to stern.  Gondolas are hand made using eight different types of wood - fir, oak, cherry, walnut, elm, mahogany, larch and lime and are composed of two hundred and eighty pieces. The oars are made of beech wood. The left side of the gondola is made longer than the right side and this asymmetry causes the gondola to resist the tendency to turn toward the left at the forward stroke from the right hand side of the boat.

From the busy canal San Luca we emerged into the Grand Canal where the gondolier had to have his wits about him as he competed for space with the Vaporetti (the water bus service), the motor boat taxis and dozens more gondola each one full of gaping wide eyed tourists admiring the elaborate mansions and palaces that make this Venice’s most exclusive area.  The ride continued past rows of gaily coloured mooring poles and  under the famous Rialto bridge and past the fish market and then with the clock ticking away the boat was turned off the Grand Canal into the canal San Salvador and the boatman expertly threaded his way back towards San Marco and the Orseola canal where the ride came to an end.  We had enjoyed it.

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Some more of my boat journeys:

Malta Tony-Oki-Koki

Corfu-1984 Georges Boat

Motorboat Ride from Kalami to Corfu Town

The Bay of Bodrum in Turkey

Rowing Boat on Lake Bled in Slovenia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Croatia

A Boat Ride with Dolphins in Wales

Captain Ben’s Boat in Anti Paros

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Venice, Vaporetto Ride to Burano

“What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets, vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries, and all partly submerged; no dry land visible anywhere, and no sidewalks worth mentioning…”                                                                                                                              Mark Twain - ‘The Innocents Aborad’

Burano is an island in the Venetian Lagoon and on all of my three visits to Venice I have visited its smaller neighbour which is famous for brightly coloured houses and intricate lacework.

Burano is situated seven kilometers from Venice, a short forty minute trip by Venetian public transport motorboats called Vaporetto.  We waited at a stop on the Grand Canal and when one arrived waited for the boatman to secure it and then invite us to go on board and climbed to the upper deck where there was a good view of the city and the other islands.

The boat followed a route clearly marked by buoys so that it couldn’t get lost or run aground and stopped twice on the mainland peninsula of Treporti before making the crossing to Burano across the lagoon.  It was a good approach to the island and as we got closer we could make out the pastel coloured houses in contrast to the blue of the sky with shimmering reflections in the sea and the Church of San Martino, with a campanile leaning at a perilous angle, the consequence of sinking foundations.

Like Venice itself it could more correctly be called an archipelago of  islands linked by bridges.  Burano actually consists of four individual islands, which are separated by narrow, ten meter wide canals, rio Pontinello in the west, rio Zuecca in the south und rio Terranova in the east. Originally, there were five islands and a fourth canal but that was filled in to become a piazza joining the former islands of San Martino Destra and San Martino Sinistra.

Burano is known for its small, brightly-painted houses, which are popular with artists.  The colours of the houses follow a specific system originating from the golden age of the sixteenth century and owners cannot simply choose a shade from a Dulux colour chart before sending a request to the government because it will only respond by advising of the colours permitted for that particular house or building.

We stepped off the Vaporetti and walked the short distance to the centre of the island where a string of shops and restaurants lined the main street.  Burano is most famous for its elegant lace making based on a tradition introduced in the sixteenth century when women on the island began making lace with needles, which was a method introduced to the island from Venetian-ruled Cyprus.

When Leonardo da Vinci visited in 1481, he visited the small town of Lefkara and purchased a cloth for the main altar of the Duomo di Milano.  The lace was soon exported across Europe, and in 1872 a school of lace making was opened.  Lace making on the island boomed again, but few now make lace in the traditional manner as it is extremely time-consuming and therefore very expensive.

Although it was busy there was a gentler pace than in Venice itself and we competed with tourists and other day trippers to walk alongside the canals which were multi-coloured on account of the wobbling reflections of the gaily coloured houses trapped in the languid movements of the water.  It didn’t take long to wander around the narrow streets and cross the bridges that joined the islands and once we had circumnavigated and explored some of the back streets along the route we were quickly back in the main piazza, the Baldassarre Galuppi where it was time for lunch at the pavement tables of the freshly painted green and red, Trattoria Romano.

After the best calzone pizza I have ever tasted and a couple of cold pironi beers it was approaching mid afternoon so after another casual walk and an Italian speciality ice cream we returned to the vaporetto terminus which was unusually busy and I worried about being able to get on board which would have meant a wait of another hour.  I needn’t have been concerned of course because there was plenty of room and soon we were pulling away and slipping through the waters of the lagoon and leaving Burano and its coloured houses in the distance as we returned to Venice.

Venice, Piazza San Marco

“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”
Henry James

Napoleon may or may not have called the Piazza San Marco “the finest drawing room in Europe” but whether he did or he didn’t it doesn’t really matter because it is indeed one of the finest squares in all of Europe.

San Marco or is the principal public square of Venice where it is generally known just as ‘the Piazza’.  All other urban spaces in the city (except the Piazzetta) are called ‘campi’ (fields).  The Piazzetta (the ‘little Piazza’) is an extension of the Piazza towards the lagoon in its south east corner and the two spaces together form the social, religious and political centre of the city.

All visitors to Venice are drawn first to San Marco where they compete with thousands of pigeons to find a seat or a column or a piece of pavement stone to sit and rest and admire the sumptuous magnificence of the place.

The Piazza is dominated at its eastern end by the great church of St Mark where the whole of the west facade with its great arches and marble decoration, the Romanesque carvings round the central doorway and, above all, the four horses which preside over the whole piazza as potent symbols of the pride and power of Venice; such a symbol of power that Napoleon, after he had conquered Venice, had them removed and shipped to Paris.  We visited the church and climbed to the balcony where the replica horses look down on the geometric patterns of Istrian stone and the tables and chairs of the famous cafés, Quadri and Florian set out, alongside others, with neat precision all around the perimeter.

Next door in the Piazzetta is the Doge’s Palace with gothic arcades at ground level and an elaborate loggia on the floor above and a long queue of people waiting for their turn at the ticket office.  We joined this and enjoyed the sun as the queue moved slowly past and around the street vendors and the ladies selling bags of grain for feeding the birds.  The Palace is a museum now and we took the route through the rooms where great works of art were displayed and then crossed the Bridge of Sighs to reach the old Palace prisons on the other side of a canal.

Opposite the Palace, standing free in the Piazza, is the red brick Campanile of St Mark’s church constructed in 1173, last restored in 1514 and faithfully rebuilt in 1912 after the collapse of the former campanile on 14^th July 1902.  Apparently, on that day, Venice woke up in the morning to a pile of rubble where they were used to seeing the tower and we hoped that history wouldn’t repeat itself today because we took the lift to the top of the bell tower and were rewarded with stunning views over all of the city and the islands of the lagoon.

The cafés in San Marco are notoriously expensive but as we had already spent a small fortune on a gondola ride it seemed mean not to choose a table at the Café Florian and listen to the three piece orchestra whilst sipping an overpriced glass of beer.  Luckily not all of Venice is this expensive and for evening meal we discovered a reasonably priced pizza restaurant just off the piazza on the Piazzetta dei Leoni just a few metres from the square.

Due to a number of interconnected and complicated environmental reasons Venice is slowly sinking and at various times is prone to serious flooding and for this reason the doors of all of the shops and cafés around the square are protected by water boards which are quickly put in place when a flood is imminent.  This is called the Acqua Alta, the ‘high water’, from storm surges from the Adriatic or heavy rain and it is quick to flood.  Venice is slowly slipping into the sea and it will be a tragic moment when the final tower sinks and emits a little belch of “ciao!“

Water pouring into the drains in the Piazza runs directly into the Grand Canal and this normally works well but, when the sea is high, it has the reverse effect, with water from the lagoon surging up into the Square.  The most dramatic floods are recorded on the brickwork of the Campanile and it was a bit disconcerting that some of the high water marks were way above my head.

A flooded Piazza is a bit of a nuisance of course so the city has a solution to this which is to erect elevated wooden boardwalks whenever the flooding occurs and one evening to get across the square we had to take this elevated route back from our chosen restaurant on the east of the Piazza to our hotel on the west.

At night, when all of the day trippers have left and the cruise ships have moved on San Marco is a different place and, when it isn’t flooded, the Istrian stone reflects the gentle moonlight into the dark and mysterious shady corners behind the columns of the covered pavements and with no street vendors, pigeons or thousands of tourists it was nice to wander slowly through the square and into the Piazzetta next to the Grand Canal and watch moon beams dancing on the lagoon and listen the rhythmic slapping of the water against the quayside and the rows of gondolas tied up for the night.

Venice, Three Visits, Three Hotels

“To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.”                                                                                                                                 Alexander Herzen

The traditional founding date of Venice is identified with the dedication of the first church, that of San Jacopo at the islet of Rialto and given the date of 25^th March 421.  While there are no historical records that deal directly with the origins of Venice, tradition and the available evidence have led several historians to agree that the original population of the city consisted of refugees from Roman cities nearby and from the undefended countryside, who were fleeing successive waves of invasions from the north.

Venice is a city known both for tourism and for industry, and is the capital of the region Veneto. The name is derived from the ancient tribe of Veneti that inhabited the region in Roman times. The city historically was the capital of a powerful and successful sea-born independent city-state.

Venice has been known as the “La Dominante”, “Serenissima”, “Queen of the Adriatic”, “City of Water”, “City of Masks”, “City of Bridges”, “The Floating City”, and “City of Canals”.  It stretches across one hundred and seventeen small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea and the salt water lagoon stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po (south) and the Piave (north) Rivers.

I first visited Venice in April 2002 and stayed at the Albergo San Marco near Saint Marks Square. There was perfect spring weather and I was captivated by the sights and sounds of the city which seemed to belong more correctly to a theme park than a thriving industrial sea port city. We did the sights of course, the Cathedral, Doge’s Palace, Rialto Bridge and the labyrinth of canals lined with palaces and museums. Wrapped up in the atmosphere of the place we paid £30 for a drink and a sandwich in St Mark’s Square and £80 for a ride in a gondola.  Cheaper amusement was found on the City’s water buses, the Vaporetto, including a reasonably priced ticket to visit the nearby island of Burano.

I liked the place so much that I returned twelve months later and stayed at a fabulous boutique hotel, the Locanda Orseola which was right in the middle of the San Marco area and had a room directly overlooking the Orseola canal.

I am not sure how I managed to get the bargain price, probably because it was a family room for all four of us but this was one of the nicest hotels that I have stayed in.  We did all of the same things again including the Vaporetto trip to Burano where all of the houses are painted in gay colours so that fishermen could spot them from the open sea when returning home (or so the story goes).

The weather was glorious again and we ate lunch by the Rialto Bridge and watched the hectic  traffic on the Grand Canal and dinner at the Ritorante da Raffaele next to the quieter dell’alero  canal where gondolas glided gracefully by and the water lapped gently against the bricks of the walls.

Two visits to Venice was still not enough however and I returned again in 2005 and this time stayed at the hotel Anastasia which although only three star was situated in a quiet square, the Corte Barozzi and whilst not overlooking the water directly from the room we could hear the gentle rhythm of the canal di San Moise just around the corner from the square.

We did exactly the same things of course but there was no mad rush to cram things in this time around so the experience was altogether more leisurely.

I haven’t been back to stay in Venice again since but after eight years I think it might be nearly time to go and visit one more time.

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain. Roads, radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”      Norman Lewis – ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

If Pedro Zaragoza Orts is remembered for the Beni-York skyscraper he is even more famous for the so called ‘War of the Bikini’.  In the later years of the 1950s the icon of holiday liberty was rapidly becoming the saucy two piece swimsuit but in staunchly religious Spain, still held in the firm two-handed grip of church and state, this scanty garment was seen as a threat to the very foundation of Catholic society.

According to the official version the swimsuit, that was a little more than a provocative brassiere front with a tiny g-string back, was invented by a French engineer called Louis Réard and the fashion designer Jacques Heim.  It was allegedly named after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear weapon tests on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause on the beach or at the lido would be like a nuclear explosion.  Plenty of fallout and very hot!

And it certainly had this effect in Spain and although occasionally allowable on the sandy beaches, it had to be covered up in all other areas; on the promenades and in the plazas and in the shops and the bars and cafés for fear of causing any offence.  In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite a beach wearing only a bikini, was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there.  After an argument she hit him, and her strike for social justice cost her a hefty fine of forty thousand pesetas.

Zaragoza needed tourists and tourists wanted the bikini and with more pasty-skinned northern European tourists arriving each year in search of an all over suntan the Mayor knew that the banning of the two piece swimsuit simply couldn’t be sustained or allowed to threaten his ambitious plans for development.

Zaragoza took a gamble and signed a municipal order which permitted the wearing of the bikini in public areas and in this single act he effectively jump started the Spanish tourist industry.  Zaragoza said: “People had to feel free to be able to wear what they wanted, within reason, if it helped them to enjoy themselves as they would come back and tell their friends about the place.”  In deeply religious Catholic Spain not everyone was so understanding or welcoming of the bikini however and in retaliation the Archbishop of Valencia began the excommunication process against him.

This may not seem such an especially big issue now but to get a better perspective it is important to contextualise it in terms of the time.  Spain was in the grip of an ultra-conservative dictatorship and the beaches at Benidorm were still managed in theory according to a decree of 1907 that had segregated the them into specific zones for men and women and where people could only bathe if, in the words of the decree, they were ‘decently dressed’.

Excommunication was a very serious matter in 1959 and his political supporters began to abandon him so one day, the story goes, he got up early and drove for nine hours on a little Vespa scooter to Madrid to lobby Franco himself.  The Generalissimo was suitably impressed with his determination and gave him his support, Zaragoza returned to Benidorm and the Church backed down and the approval of the bikini became a defining moment in the history of modern Spain ultimately changing the course of Spanish tourism and causing a social revolution in an austere country groaning under the yoke of the National Catholic regime.  Zaragoza went on to become Franco’s Director of Tourism and a Parliamentary Deputy.

Not many people would have described Franco as a liberalising social reformer  but not long after this lots of women on holiday in Benidorm dispensed with the bikini bra altogether and brazenly sunbathed topless and Benidorm postcards had pictures of semi-dressed ladies on them to prove it.

One thing I am certain of is that this wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference to my Nan because I am not sure that she ever possessed a swimming costume, never mind a two-piece!  She was a bit old-fashioned and the human body in the naked form was only permitted behind closed doors with the curtains closed and preferably after dark.  If she ever went in the sea I imagine it would have been in one of those Victorian one piece bathing costumes of the previous century.  Grandad too wasn’t one for showing bits of his body normally kept under his bus conductor’s dark blue uniform and didn’t even concede to a pair of shorts, preferring instead to wear his colonial style slacks even during the day.  When he came home his impressive suntan stopped at the line of his open neck shirt and his rolled up sleeves.

For people who had never been abroad before Benidorm must have been an exciting place in the early 1960s.  Palm fringed boulevards, Sangria by the jug full and, unrestrained by optics, generous measures of whiskey and gin, rum and vodka.  Eating outside at a pavement café and ordering drinks and not paying for them until leaving and scattering unfamiliar coins on the table as a tip for the waiter.  There was permanent sunshine, a delightful warm sea and unfamiliar food, although actually I seem to doubt that they would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on these holidays because to be fair anything remotely ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people they weren’t really ready for tortilla and gazpacho, tapas or paella.  They certainly didn’t return home to experiment with any new Iberian gastronomic ideas and I suspect they probably kept as close as they could to food they were familiar with.

Benidorm is a fascinating place, often unfairly maligned or sneered at but my grandparents liked it and I have been there myself in 1977 for a fortnight’s holiday and then again on a day trip in 2008 just out of curiosity.  It has grown into a mature and unique high rise resort with blue flag beaches and an ambition to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status and I hope it achieves it.

Benidorm, The Arrival of Tourism and the Plan General de Ordenación

“By the end…it was clear that Spain’s spiritual and cultural isolation was at an end, overwhelmed by the great alien invasion from the North of money and freedoms.  Spain became the most visited tourist country in the World, and slowly, as the foreigners poured in, its identity was submerged, its life-style altered more in a single decade than in the previous century.”                      Norman Lewis – ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

Sixty years ago Benidorm, although not a fishing village as such, was still a modest beach side community.  It was  a  place of sailors and fishermen who tended their nets by day and fished by night and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees in summer days of endless sunshine.  Early visitors here would have looked out over a double crescent of virgin golden sand and rolling dunes that stretched out in both directions from a rocky outcrop that divided the two beaches where Benidorm castle is believed to have once stood.

Small fishing boats, the tarrafes, each with four large lanterns to attract fish at night, bobbed in the water or lay drawn up resting on the sand.  In 1950, Benidorm didn’t attract many visitors and life was difficult, it had no water supply or sewage disposal system and waste was tipped in the sea or simply buried in the ground.

The watershed year was 1954 when the Franco loyalist, Pedro Zaragoza Orts was nominated as town Alcalde, or Mayor and he threw himself into his work and set himself an objective of improving the quality of life in the small town.

In terms of economic potential there wasn’t a lot to work with so he decided to concentrate on the first whiffs of global tourism drifting in from Northern Europe and spreading south along the Costa Brava and he imagined a dream of creating a bourgeois pan-European holiday utopia.  Benidorm had sun, it had beaches, it had sea but what it didn’t have was visitors.  Few people in Spain enjoyed the sort of standard of living to be able to take holidays in the 1950s, so he needed to attract overseas visitors.

The town had always been popular with veraneos, people who took a few days break to be by the sea, but by the 1950′s, visitors from Scandanavia and Germany were beginning to arrive in greater numbers and staying for a full week at a time, sometimes two!  Zaragoza recognised the potential of increased numbers of visitors and quickly created the Plan General de Ordenación, or city building plan, that would exploit that potential.

The plan ensured that every building would have an area of leisure land, guaranteeing a future free of the excesses of cramped construction seen in other areas of Spain and it is the only city in the country that still adheres to this rigid rule.  This vision for the future took six years to come to reality, while he waited he piped in domestic water from Polop, fifteen kilometres to the north in the mountains on the road to Guadalest and he ignited the building boom that followed and the flying start that Benidorm achieved in the package tour boom of the 1960s and 70s.

The vision for Benidorm was simultaneously brilliant and exciting and it gave the modern city its modern unique landscape because Zaragoza encouraged vertical construction of dozens of sky scrapers in a deliberate plan to make efficient use of land and to keep the city at ground level spacious and airy with green parks and open spaces and all of the accommodation relatively close to the beaches.

He explained his plan like this; ‘If you build low, you occupy all the space and have a long walk to the beach. If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts’.  This was in contrast to nearby Torrevieja and on the Costa Del Sol in the south, Marbella where excessive horizontal development led to great sprawling ugly urbanisations that have practically destroyed the coast by burying it under concrete and tarmac.  Zaragoza called this urban concentration instead of urban sprawl.

The first developments started at the centre at the rocky outcrop in the twisting narrow streets hemmed in by claustrophobic whitewashed houses, the San Jaime church with its distinctive blue tiled hat roofs, the old town promontory with the Balcon Del Mediterraneo, and pretty Mal Pas beach below and quickly spread east and west along the splendid beaches.  Today Benidorm has some of the tallest buildings not only in Spain but all of Europe but the first were fairly unassuming by comparison, the tallest reaching only a modest ten floors or so.

My grandparents were used to living higher up than most people because they lived in a first floor flat but I imagine that they found a high rise hotel in Benidorm really exciting.  In the early hotels there was a lot of utilitarian concrete and steel and I am certain that we would consider them quite basic affairs now but they had something that Nan and Grandad were not accustomed to – an en-suite bathroom, because they didn’t have the luxury of any sort of bathroom in their Catford flat.

The first hotels have mostly been demolished and replaced now but I imagine they enjoyed sitting on the balcony of their room and looking out over the inviting Mediterranean Sea because this was a thousand miles and a hundred thousand years away from reality.  They were certainly very relaxed because feet on the table like this would never have been permitted at home.  We were only allowed into the best front room once a year at Christmas and we weren’t allowed to touch anything so I am surprised by this.

Not everyone approved of the changes however and Norman Lewis may have had Zaragoza Orts in mind when he wrote in ‘Voices of the Old Sea’:

“The ancient handsome litter of the sea front had possessed its own significance, its vivacity and its charm.  A spirited collection of abandoned windlasses, the ribs of forgotten boats, the salt wasted, almost translucent gallows on which the fish had once been dried, the sand polished sculpture of half buried driftwood … was now abolished at a stroke”

Benidorm and the Northern Europe Tourist Invasion

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain…. Roads, the radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”                                                                                                                                           Norman Lewis –  ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.

They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard aeroplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmeston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.  After paying the rent on the first floor Catford apartment Grandad used to spend most of the rest of his wages on Embassy cigarettes, Watney’s Red Barrel and in the Bookies so perhaps he had a secret source of income?  He does look like a bit of a gangland boss in some of these pictures or perhaps he had a good system and had done rather well on the horses.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well.

Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.