The Spanish embassy in London offers a reception to the Spanish delegation in the inauguration of "Gran Benidorm"
The Art Gallery Room One hosts works by Óscar Tusquets dedicated to the city
The Spanish ambassador in London, Carlos Bastarreche, offered an official reception yesterday to the delegation of Benidorm that has travelled to London to attend the inauguration of the exhibition "Gran Benidorm" by Oscar Tusquets, two of whose works were also selected for The London Art Biennale. The Benidorm delegation was headed by the mayor Toni Pérez, members of the municipal corporation, the president of Hosbec, Toni Mayor, leaders of Visit Benidorm Foundation and prominent local entrepreneurs.
The official reception took place at the Spanish Embassy yesterday afternoon and lasted about two hours in which a meeting was also held in which some of the main issues of current interest and interest to the tourism sector were reviewed, such as the possible effects of Brexit on the evolution of the tourist market in Benidorm, the problematic of the false claims of some tourists promoted by English law firms against the Spanish hotel industry, and the positioning of Benidorm as the main peninsular tourist town of sun and beach .
The meeting was also attended by the cultural attaché of the Embassy, Fernando Villalonga, and the director of the Spanish Tourism Office in London, Javier Piñanes. The mayor in turn exposed the actions being carried out by the City Council and Visit Benidorm Foundation, to position the city as an Intelligent Tourist Destination and to continue improving the management of public services with the use of new technologies in the field of sustainability, accessibility and circular economy.
After the meeting at the embassy, the Benidorm delegation moved to the Art gallery Room One, where the exhibition "Gran Benidorm" was inaugurated, and where the London public can contemplate from today part of Óscar Tusquets' work on Benidorm, and that constitutes a great visual homage to the city, its architecture and its urban model.
Óscar Tusquets also praised this model before the Spanish ambassador, pointing out that his defense of Benidorm in the cultural and artistic media in which he operates, "is not a product of the desire to take him against anyone, but the personal conviction that Benidorm is a very interesting and beautiful city, a new and innovative beauty that improves every year. "
The mayor also stressed the importance of the projection of the image of Benidorm in the United Kingdom, the fact that it is also present in the artistic circles of London, a showcase suitable to publicize a new reality of Benidorm that puts in value the sustainability of its urban planning and the efficiency in the management of its resources.
The exhibition "Gran Benidorm" also invites visitors to reflect on a city that has become the maximum representation of the dense city that can be easily walked on foot, and the building in height with all the advantages it entails in terms of savings Energy and soil release.
Tusquets sample emphasizes that "the compact aspect of Benidorm has been created with the intention of altering the territory as little as possible" and emphasizes that "if coastal municipalities had developed following this model, the great majority of the coastline would retain in its virgin state "or put another way," thirteen Benidorm would suffice to deal with the entire Spanish tourist industry. "
The catalog of the exhibition that can be visited today in London explores this idea by pointing out that "in the urban coastal area of Benidorm the land is currently only 15%, with the rest being gardens, swimming pools and other facilities. That in other municipalities where it has grown horizontally, building semi-detached houses, the occupation of the territory can reach 70 percent. "