The pull of the south of Spain

In the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, the occasional foreign traveller found themselves in the south of Spain.

Many of them were British and wrote about what they found here: from Richard Ford to Laurie Lee and Gerald Brenan, these adventurers who bothered to leave a record of their travels to Spain were the unwitting forerunners of mass tourism.

Little did they imagine that 100 years later their compatriots would be visiting the south of Spain in their thousands, arriving by air to spend a week or two on the beach, by the pool, in bars where everyone speaks their language and on weekend breaks to explore city monuments and museums.

On their adventurous journeys through the south of Spain, coming across coastal villages, busy cities and isolated farms in the mountains, our early travellers would have found no one to speak English to and no information in their own language.

This week at the World Travel Market in London, a huge delegation from Andalucía and the Costa del Sol has been working hard to keep up the record-breaking figures of tourists, especially the British, visiting the south of Spain.

General tourism figures are on the up, however there is still plenty of work for the staff at the Andalusian and Costa del Sol tourist boards.

Homework still has to be done for the ongoing campaigns to encourage year-round tourism, rather than just the summer rush. The number of seats offered by airlines between the UK and Malaga this season is up 7.3 per cent, we learned this week, a sign that promotion of winter breaks on the Costa del Sol is bearing some fruit.

And another goal that comes up every year at the World Travel Market is to attract tourists who spend more money.

Ronda, for example, has little interest in coachloads of visitors who crowd onto the Puente Nuevo, eat the sandwich they brought with them from the hotel and maybe at most buy a bottle of water and a fridge magnet. Even our early travellers would have spent the night in an inn and probably paid handsomely for dinner.

Quality rather than quantity is what some tourism authorities are seeking, and rising hotel prices support this aim.

Yet Andalucía, and especially the Costa del Sol, is still a favourite holiday destination among Brits, from your average working class family to wealthy golfers, not forgetting young backpackers, weekend breakers and digital nomads.

It would take a huge disaster to change that; even the pandemic failed to shake the British fondness of Spain and the Costa del Sol and visitors rushed back as soon as they could. After all, the attraction goes back a long way, to those early travellers who wrote about the delights of Andalucía.