The most pop Benidorm of the 50s, 60s and 70s takes the form of a book

'Beach, sun and flying saucers. A pop guide to Benidorm and the Marina Baixa' by Pedro Delgado Casals, historian, professional drummer and director of Pipus Records, has been presented in a Town Hall Assembly Hall filled to the brim with those who starred in an era that remains in the memory, Benidorm at night between 1958 and 1978.

Among the public, the mayor, Toni Pérez, the councillor for Historical and Cultural Heritage (area that has collaborated in the edition of the book), Ana Pellicer and other members of the corporation, many musicians, professionals and amateurs; and descendants of those entrepreneurs who invested their assets in a city that opened to the world through nightlife and tourism to build the city we know today.

The Councilor for the Presidency, Juan Díaz, presented the event and introduced the editor Vicente Sanjuan and Juan Antonio Portolés, friends of the author's adventures on those nights and son of one of the communicators who knew how to make the city known to the world, the journalist Juan Antonio Portolés.

In his presentation, Díaz said that the book is “the embodiment of an emotional Benidorm, a glamorous Benidorm”, “the sixties and seventies years where anything was possible”. The journalist has pointed out that in the pages of 'Beach, Sun and Flying Saucers' there is everything: social and tourist anthropology, experiential prospection and introspection, leisure, urbanism, legendary biographies, historicist moments, musical narrative, interviews, protagonists, and a unique and unparalleled setting: the city of Benidorm in absolute boiling water.”

Before the author's words, Sanjuan reviewed the editing process of the volume where it is revealed that "the best national and international performers have always come to Benidorm" and Portolés has referred to the city's "glorious past" when remembering the birth of local groups in which he participated in an “exciting and tremendously fun” experience and in which, just a group of about thirty musicians, “we seemed like three hundred” in a Benidorm in which “zombies cannot live, but Yes, they can dance.”

The last to intervene was Delgado, who acknowledged that his initial intention was to “try to elucidate” whether the British Led Zeppelin had performed at the Cap 3,000 “El Ovni” nightclub, but that, upon further investigation, he found such a quantity of material that he has allowed us to delve deeper “into the archaeology of local leisure” and create a “didactic and informative guide” thanks to the investigation of “party halls, 'boîtes' and discotheques, but mainly in the people behind them.”

Delgado has recalled legendary rooms such as El Burro, El Alcázar or El Granada, the first British 'pubs' or “the push and modernization” that represented the arrival of the 'pied-noirs', the European settlers in French Algeria, many of them are from Spanish origin from the province of Alicante and specifically from Benidorm. They took the initiative in promoting nightlife and opted for iconic nightclubs such as the one mentioned above, Cap 3,000, or Penélope, among others.

The author has made special mention of the importance of the Spanish Song Festival and the promotion that it meant for Benidorm to become the centre of music in a country that was opening up to the world and that attracted national and international figures from the first order.

After a series of words, the event concluded with the signing of books by the author and with a performance by one of the groups of those years, the New Experience, made up of former members of local groups such as Control, Blue Stars or Los Signos. , Benidorm's first pop group.