Sixty years ago, British film director David Lean travelled to Spain’s remote southern province of Almería to shoot his Oscar-winning movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”
The location was chosen because “this really was just an empty desert facing the beautiful sea,” recalled Peter Beale, who was a young runner on the film set. The movie crew built a plywood replica of Aqaba, the Red Sea port city, in a dry riverbed leading down to the pristine beach of Algarrobico, a temporary stand-in for Lawrence and his troops to charge on horseback and capture.
In the decades following, many other parts of the Spanish coastline became almost unrecognisable, with massive construction to draw tourists and their dollars. Resort towns mushroomed, yachting marinas eclipsed fishing ports, and golf courses became the greenery of choice to lure foreign visitors, including many retirees from northern Europe.
But even as Almería was itself transformed by greenhouse agriculture, much of its land remained pristine and windswept, rugged and arid, hosting few aside from film crews keen to offer the likes of Clint Eastwood, Orson Welles, Yul Brynner and Jack Nicholson a striking terrain worthy of their movie adventures. To this day, Almería remains relatively hard to access, unconnected to the high-speed rail network that crisscrosses the rest of Spain.
However, mass tourism has not spared Almería entirely, and the beach where Lean built Aqaba is now dominated by an equally incongruous but strikingly more permanent and less successful project: a 21-story hotel that was abandoned when it was nearing completion nearly two decades ago. With three construction cranes still hovering above, the derelict hotel stands as an unused, unusable eyesore in the midst of one of the largest protected nature sanctuaries in southern Europe, the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Nature Reserve.
How such a hotel could be erected, and what should now happen to its giant concrete carcass, has been the subject of a 15-year court battle — one that has also become a litmus test for whether Spain can encourage more sustainable development in its travel industry, which has long underpinned the Spanish economy. The saga of the Algarrobico hotel also underlines another serious issue in Spain and anywhere else where real estate acts as an economic engine: When it comes to facilitating tourism, nature is more easily damaged than repaired.
“How the Algarrobico hotel can still exist is a mystery, but unfortunately the truth is that it is not an isolated case and there have been other Algarrobicos along the Spanish coast,” said Pilar Marcos, a biologist who runs the Spanish biodiversity projects of Greenpeace, the nongovernmental environmental organisation. “We have repeatedly managed to ignore regulations in search of the golden goose,” she said. — NYT
