Benidorm

Benidorm is the most vertical town in Spain and the clearest thing the country has to a purpose-built city of holidays. It was a fishing village of a few thousand people until the general plan of 1956, pushed through by the mayor Pedro Zaragoza, traded low density for height and let the towers rise straight off the sand. The result is a skyline with more buildings above a hundred metres per inhabitant than any other city in the world, roughly one for every three thousand residents, and among them the Gran Hotel Bali at a hundred and eighty six metres, the tallest hotel in Spain. Two long beaches run either side of a rocky promontory that carries the old town and the Balcon del Mediterraneo, a tiled lookout on the site of a vanished castle. Behind the strip lie four theme parks and the cliffs of the Sierra Helada, and seventeen kilometres inland the castle village of Guadalest sits on its rock as one of the most visited villages in Spain.