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HISTORICAL NOTES

They say, with reason, that the Costa del Sol is the fruit of an old alliance which is lost in the memory of time, between the warm Mediterranean sea which bathes and caresses it, and the most brilliant sun in the intense blue Andalusian sky.

This old union attracted the first visitors before mass tourism began to develop in the world, and not only those ravers who travelled the south of Spain in the 18th and 19th centuries, the romantic travellers, but also the first tourists in the 20’s who arrived in Málaga because they knew the benign climate when half of Europe was shivering with cold. In this second decade of the 20th century there were those who guessed right that the city of Málaga, then being the only developed urban space, in time would become a privileged place to spend the winter for the incipient European classes who began to travel: that the port in the bay would attract many boats and establish regular lines and programmes for tourist cruises, and this was how it would be in the following decades, and that ultimately, there was an ample stretch of coast in the south which was especially appropriate for resting, active leisure, and why not, fun.

Those who then ventured a magnificent tourist future where not wrong, although they should have situated the beginning at some kilometres further west, as it was Torremolinos, then dependent on the municipality of Málaga, which was the start of a career towards mass tourism in the 20’s and 30’s, when the exoticism and charm of Andalusia narrated by the travellers, the cheap prices and the proverbial Andalusian friendliness made an impression on the British, Germans, Danes, Belgium, Dutch and Swedes. The building of the golf course in the Parador Nacional de Turismo in 1925, couldn’t have been a whim. This was the second golf course to appear in Spain.

Independently of those mythical hotels or boarding houses in 1934 and 1940, Montemar and La Roca, you could say that the history of the Costa del Sol as an international tourist area surged in 1957 when the airport of Málaga, then called the El Rompedizo, received its first charter flight from Germany.

But when the pioneers of the area coincided on settling the timid beginnings of mass tourism in a Europe coming out of a second great war, it was with the inauguration of the first grand luxury hotel, the Pez Espada in Torremolinos in 1959. The opening of this hotel meant the starting signal for a long career towards the tourist development on the whole coast, which other first category hotel projects would participate in immediately afterwards, and which were very representative on the Costa del Sol such as the Carihuela Palace in 1960, the Tritón in 1961, the Tres Carabelas in 1962 which is now the Meliá Torremolinos, the Nautilus in 1963, and Riviera and Al Andalus in 1964. Later, there was a huge blossoming of all kinds of accommodation to attend to the real avalanche of visitors in the 70’s and 80’s up to our days.