The pictures, in black and white, were donated by the businessman and sponsor Wim Kuipers, who found them by chance while looking for material about the Costa del Sol
The Archive department launches a 2024 calendar with photographs of Benidorm taken by a family of British tourists in the 50s and 60s
For the third consecutive year, the Benidorm Municipal Archive welcomes the new year with a calendar about the city created from its photographic collection. On this occasion, the department headed by councillor Ana Pellicer has chosen photographs from the fund donated by the Dutch businessman and patron Wim Kuipers that were taken by a family of British tourists in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Pellicer has highlighted that "these are unpublished images that contain a story of chance and altruism, whose protagonist is Wim Kuipers himself." Thus, she recalled that for decades Kuipers has been working to recover the historical heritage of Torremolinos and El Ejido. "In his desire to document the tourist history of both municipalities," he detailed, "Wim Kuipers acquired an album containing photographs of a British family's vacation in the Spanish Mediterranean, locating among the pages several sheets of images captured in Benidorm in a period that we date between 1959 and 1962.”
In total, 86 photographs of the city are now part of the municipal fund of which 16 have been selected for this 2024 calendar.
As Pellicer explained, "Due to the content of the images, some of a personal nature and others of landscapes and places in Benidorm, we know that this British family was staying at the Rosaleda Hotel and that during their stay they visited the municipal food market that was settled on Martínez Oriola and Costera del Barco streets, who enjoyed bathing on Poniente beach, who walked through Tomás Ortuño and Carreró dels Gats streets and who visited the port and the Castell.”
As in previous years, the City Council has reserved around 300 calendars to make them available to citizens while supplies last. Thus, people interested in obtaining a copy can go in the next few days, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., to the Archive offices, located on the ground floor of the town hall building.
The councillor has pointed out that “this calendar is a witness to part of our recent history and it also does so with some very well-crafted photographs that return us to a Benidorm of low houses, tarrafas in the sand (a traditional type of fishing gear), and earth in the streets that were already beginning to show Benidorm as a tourist leader as it would end up becoming.”
