'It was madness: the shelves were empty every night': Andalucía's first hypermarket celebrates its 50th anniversary

Paco Godoy's working life would be unusual nowadays: in 46 years of employment he has only had one job. He started working at the age of 19 in Hiper, which was the first hypermarket to open in Andalucía and the second in Spain, after Barcelona. A revolutionary commercial format that had already taken other European countries by storm, and that came to Malaga before Madrid. And the man responsible for this initiative was well-known Malaga businessman Manuel Martín Almendro, who on a trip to France was impressed by the large supermarkets that were already proliferating there. He decided to bring the concept to his homeland and in 1975 he opened Hiper: just called that, because at that time there were no other hypermarkets to differentiate himself from.

The slogan was "Hiper rompe los precios" (Hiper smashes prices); it opened with 350 employees and was a resounding success from the start, "a real craze" according to the retired workers who attended this week's commemoration of its 50th anniversary. Later, Hiper became Pryca and then Carrefour Los Patios. The event was attended by the mayor, the regional minister for employment, the president of the CEA and the director of Carrefour in Andalucía, among others.

"At the beginning I was a stock boy and I arrived at six in the morning. Every night the shelves ended up empty because everything was sold out," recalls Godoy. His colleague, also retired, Pepi González, started working there when she was only 17 ("In the beginning I couldn't work as a cashier because I wasn't 18", she recalls) and remembers those first months as "truly crazy": "We had a time to clock-in but no time to clock-out, people invaded us! When they saw that line of frozen food stretching as far as the eye could see, when they saw those shelves, boxes upon boxes... Nobody was used to that!" she says.

And there were many novelties introduced all at once. The trolleys, the self-service format, the outdoor parking for thousands of cars, the endless line of cash registers and cashiers in orange uniforms ("They looked like butane bottles," recalls Pepi), an assortment of 35,000 products under the same roof, the own brand, 20,000 square metres of commercial space, payment by credit card... New consumer habits to which the people of Malaga became quickly accustomed to. Going to the Hiper, then when it changed its name to Pryca, became a Saturday ritual for many families, who went in their cars (or took several buses) to fill the pantry for the week and, incidentally, to have a day out.

What also attracted customers, were exhibitions and recreational activities that the store used to organise at weekends in its car park. "They used to organise real parties: car racing, raffles, concerts, free snacks for the children, stalls with items on sale...", recalls Pepi González. The inauguration was an extravagant event: for five days they held performances and competitions, as evidenced by the advertisement reproduced here: on one of those evenings a Seat 133 was raffled off and a Rumba 3 concert was held, hosted by the "famous Kiko Ledgarg", who back then, was the presenter of TV quiz show 'Un, dos, tres'.

And what about the legendary King Kong at Pryca: an eight-metre-high replica that divided a generation of local people (some were fascinated, others traumatised). During the back-to-school and Christmas campaigns, madness was also unleashed: "On the Night of the Three Kings, from 12 o'clock onwards, all the toys were half price: you could imagine the queues that formed," says Pepi.

"It was the first hypermarket in the south and the second in Spain. A place that not only changed how people shopped, but also changed the lives of thousands of people. Los Patios was a revolution; people from all over the province came to discover something new, an unforgettable experience. Today we celebrate that past with pride and look to the future with the same enthusiasm as the day it opened. Today, 50 years later, Carrefour Andalucía employs over 11,000 people in 435 Carrefour, Carrefour Market, Carrefour Express and Supeco formats," said the hypermarket manager, Miguel Ángel Marín. In the province of Malaga, the chain currently has more than 2,500 employees.

The president of the CEA (confederation of business owners of Malaga and Andalucía), Javier González de Lara, acknowledged feeling "a certain nostalgia" when seeing Manuel Martín Almendro in the old Hiper photographs, who as well as being the department store's backer, was also the founder of the CEA.

"It is a source of pride to recognise and appreciate the fact that a man from Malaga was capable of having an almost psychic vision of how shopping was going to be revolutionised and of promoting an initiative of this calibre," he said.