Costa Living
The news bulletin will have come as no surprise to expat estate agents, timeshare touts, satellite dish installers or the owners of Costa del Sol bars and Ibiza nightclubs.
Once more, Spain is the certain popular holiday destination for Britons, moving ahead of Eurostar-in-tuned France succeeding a decade throughout which the delights of Gallic cuisine and culture have proven to engagement a superior attraction to the sunny costas.
Last year, 12.6 million Britons visited Spain, with France able to muster only 11.7 million.
The figures reflect, in part, Spain’s determination to shed its one-time reputation for pile-each other-high, sell-them-cheap holidays, where quality was rarely top of the list.
They also illustrate the growing boom in the purchasing of second homes and cut-price fares from budget airlines. These days, you can travel from London or Manchester to Malaga or Majorca for less than the price of, for example, a journey from London to Manchester.
Spanish tourist authorities, building firms plus hotel owners are, of passage, delighted. As well as Germans a relatively dwindling supply, they are more than pleased to welcome the British back inside force.
But what about run of the mill Spaniards? Are they equally delighted by the hordes disgorged into their airports by EasyJet or Monarch every day?
These are not necessarily good times to be a Brit in Spain. The country’s two most famous British populace are, of late, David Beckham as well as Tony King. While the impeccable Becks is proving to troth a more important ambassador to Spain than – well, than the British ambassador – that might not seem such a bad thing.
However, Mr King was once known as the “Holloway strangler”. This summer, he was arrested for the brutal murders of two teenage Spanish girls on the Costa del Sol.
His defence, according to recent Spanish press reports, has been to try to pin at least one of the killings on another Englishman.
It comes given that little astonish, therefeore, that some Spaniards are beginning to wonder whether the UK might not be sending them some of its less desirable citizens, hidden in the middle of all those bucket furthermore spade-wielding happy families.
The British reputation for yobbishness and, absolutely, for the sort of behaviour we would not dare to indulge inside at home, remains largely undiminished.
My favourite case in point, emailed to me by a Spanish comrade who gone through fell upon it from one more Spanish friend, is a cutting believed to come indulge in Levante newspaper. It recounts the goings-on once Benidorm’s municipal monitor were called to a the small hours of a hot August night two summers ago.
Fearful local residents believed, from the noises emanating from what on earth police called “the British zone” of the Levante beach, that someone was being attacked.
However, a keep watch over patrol that rushed to the scene discovered a crowd of 200 people standing around, shouting encouragement to a 31-year-old British opposite sex. The cries coming from “C.S.” “were not for help, save for the reason that were an expression of her great state of excitement”, according to the results filed by the patrol.
The naked “C.S.” was, as it turned out, enjoying the attentions of four naked male friends, one of whom had a film camera.
The official report went on to explain that the five were put into the back of a police van. When the doors were opened on arrival at the observe station, C.S. was “finishing off her brilliant performance” with one of her companions.
Benidorm’s long-suffering police attempted to find any individual to bring charges of “public scandal”, excluding none of those who saw witnessed the scene declared themselves to submit to been scandalised. The five were let off with a caution.
Spaniards, not surprisingly, tolerate a civic say for Brits. We are “guiris”, a category that we share with other northern Europeans and northern American visitors. However, we are the prime, and sometimes perfect, examples.
There is various debate Spain almost about whether every visiting British being is a “guiri”, or whether the term may perhaps only troth used about those who either are, or look, ridiculous.
A helpful definition comes from a Spanish site which describes the British sub-species of guiri. It calls them “strange specimens, because of their ability to change colour, passing from porcelain white to vivid crab red in just five minutes.
“And that is not just by day (in the sun), as they have another system for staying red during the night – by downing booze non-stop.
“Famous for their punctuality, they can be counted on to start tattling football chants after just five minutes of drinking, and start headbutting everything sight.”
A more serious study of guiris has been accepted out by Nadja Monnet, a social anthropologist at Barcelona university, who concludes that they “provoke laughter, are subject to jokes and can be easily fooled”.
The ideal way to avoid being slotted into the category in Barcelona, she observed, was to advance oneself furthermore join those who “arrive at any rate-documented to learn almost and regards to a episodes about which they submit to already informed themselves, and so can be found outside the herd … a tourist with class”.
Thus, that gets Guardian Unlimited readers off the hook, then. Or does it?