Even someone like me, who closely follows where public money goes, approves of the one and a half million euros allocated by the Generalitat Valenciana. for the third year in a row Benidorm Festival. Let’s remember, it is an event that does not fade away in a day and keeps the city’s name on prime time on state television for a full week. In the words of politicians, it helps deseasonalize tourism by stimulating the economy in the first week of February.
But most of all, I think Benidorm Fest did it right by killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it revives the flavor of the sixties that saw the birth of the festival. Julio Iglesias And Raphael. On the other hand, it also pays tribute to the entire gay community that has turned Benidorm into one of the fetish cities along with Torremolinos and Sitges.
After long years Eurovision Song Contest came out of the closet and the legion of Eurofans turned the finals of the selection process into a kind of prologue stage to choose the Spanish representative. pride festival, It was only fair that the city that would hold the previous festival was Benidorm. A free city if ever there was one, as Óscar Bernácer reflected so well in his documentary The Man Who Bottled the Sun, which he dedicated to Pedro Zaragoza, the mayor who transformed it. It was valued by an urban planning genius like Mario Gaviria. Due to the complexity of its vertical development, with its large garden areas for citizens, it was introduced, without any joke, as a World Heritage Site.
Whether you like the candidates more or less (my favorite is bolerazo) St. Peter) Benidorm Festival is a nice gesture from Valencia and TVE. They were indebted to Alicante.