The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 73 | 16 – 23 August 2026

From the Editor

Well, that was worth standing still for. The light went thin and metallic over the bay on Wednesday evening, the sun slid behind the hills mid‑eclipse exactly as promised, and half of Spain stood in the street with cardboard glasses on. Thank you to everyone who sent a photograph. Normal service resumes.

This week the biggest story in town is a decision made in Valencia rather than anything happening on the sand. The Gemelos 28 towers, the pair that have had a demolition argument hanging over them for two decades, look as though they are staying. That’s below, with the numbers.

And I have a favour to ask you, which is not something I do often. It’s the first thing you’ll read, and it will take you about a minute. If you’d rather skip it, the week’s events start straight after.

The Towers Stay. The Promenade Grows Instead.

Fifty million euros, an international design competition, and the quiet end of a demolition order that has hung over Levante for twenty years.

If you have walked the Levante promenade you have walked past the problem without knowing it. Down at the Rincón end stand the Gemelos 28 towers, built when the coastal rules were looser, and sitting closer to the water than the law now permits. The legal argument about whether they should come down has ground on for the best part of two decades.

Earlier this month the Generalitat announced its answer, and it is a neat one. Rather than knock the towers down, move the shoreline. The plan is to complete both promenades: Poniente extended from Avenida Vicente Llorca Alós down to Tamarindos, and Levante carried on from the Old Town round to Punta Llisera, giving Benidorm a single continuous walk from one end of the bay to the other. Do that, and the towers are no longer standing on protected ground.

The figures are the persuasive part. The promenade work is costed at around €50 million. Demolishing the towers and putting things back was estimated at about €140 million. To decide what the new stretches actually look like, the regional government will run an international design competition with a budget of €3.8 million, with €30,000 for second place and €20,000 for third. The winning team designs the scheme and oversees the building of it.

Vicente Martínez Mus, the regional vice‑president behind it, put the philosophy plainly: against a culture of demolition, he said, they are defending projects that make coastal protection, public use and legal certainty compatible with one another. Benidorm’s mayor Toni Pérez called the proposal bold, exciting and fair. He would, but on this occasion he has a point.

Now the caveats, because this is Spain and this is the coast. The competition is due to be launched before the end of this year, teams get roughly three months to submit, and a winning design should be known in the first quarter of 2027. Only then does anyone start drawing up the real thing. The national ministry has had the proposal since March and has yet to formally respond. Nothing is being built this year, next year, or on your holiday.

What this means for you:

• Nothing changes on this trip, or the next one. This is a paper stage, not a building stage
• The eventual prize is a continuous seafront walk, Tamarindos to Punta Llisera, with no inland detour
• The Gemelos 28 towers are almost certainly not coming down, so the flats in them are worth something again
• When it does start, expect years of hoardings on Poniente. Worth knowing if you always book the same block

☀️ What’s On This Week

The bank holiday has gone and the town has not noticed. Four things this week cost nothing at all, which in the third week of August is close to a miracle.

Also on: Terra Mítica’s Summer Nights keep the Iberia zone open until 11pm this Friday, pools and slides running, live DJ, no extra charge on top of your ticket. And the international handball tournament finishes at the Palau d’Esports on Sunday if you fancy watching something competitive in air conditioning.

Coming Up: the Benidorm Beach Festival takes over the Gran Hotel Bali from 27 to 30 August with salsa, bachata and kizomba rooms, pool parties and workshops. Then on Sunday 30 August the town swims home: the 24th Travesía a Nado l’Illa‑Port de Benidorm, two nautical miles from the island to the port, capped at 300 swimmers, entries through Chip Levante and going quickly.

🍺 Where to Wet Your Whistle

Three picks. This week, one for the history, one for the view, and one for when somebody else is paying.

The pint: Vincents, on Calle del Mercado in the Old Town, which has a decent claim to being the first British bar Benidorm ever had. It opened in 1965, when the resort had barely started going up, and it is still doing the same job: a proper pint, British food through the day, and karaoke from nine every night. On price, the honest picture rather than an invented number. Old Town bars rarely go above €3.50 a pint, the happy hours around English Square run €1.50 to €2.50, and the seafront terraces will take €3 to €4.50 off you. Vincents sits in the middle of that and always has.

The cocktail, or rather the jug: Bar Mal Pas, at Calle Mal Pas 1, right above the cove where they show the film on Friday. Sangria is what it is known for, the terrace looks straight out at the water, and the crowd is a proper mix of locals and people who have found it by accident. Go in the hour before sunset, order a jug and something from the tapas list, and take your time. It is not a smart cocktail bar and it is not pretending to be.

The meal: Casa Toni, tucked into the Gemelos IV building on Avenida de Cuenca, and the reason it makes the list this week is the arroz del senyoret, the rice where everything has already been peeled for you. Sea bass baked in a salt crust and the garlic prawns are the other two to order. Be warned that this is a proper dinner rather than a cheap one, somewhere around €30 to €60 a head, and it is closed on Mondays with evening service from half seven. Book it.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

If this reaches you on Sunday, the boards are already out.

Tonight it is Meatloaf at Sinatra’s, a double bill of Neil Diamond and Coldplay at Philippines 10, and Maria G at the Western Saloon, which remains the only place in town where a cowboy hat passes without comment.

Into the week: Queen Forever at the Morgan Tavern and Adele at Rockerfellas on Monday, Soul Girl at Jail Rock on Tuesday, Tom Jones at Sinatra’s on Wednesday and a Harry Styles show at the Tropical Bar on Thursday. Wednesday is also the Beatles up at the castle, and since the castle is free and finishes early, the sensible order is castle first, strip after.

The end of the week is thinner on the published calendar, which usually means the venues have not filed anything rather than that nothing is happening. The Old Town is the answer there. The bars around the Plaça de la Constitució chalk the act on a board outside and nobody publishes a thing in advance, because they have never needed to.

Before you head out: line‑ups change nightly across the whole resort, and start times drift. The board outside the venue and its own Facebook page are the final word, always.

☀️ Weather Watch — Late August 2026

Hot, still, and stubbornly warm overnight. The models disagree about quite how hot, with the optimistic ones offering 30°C and the pessimistic ones pushing towards the mid thirties inland, so plan for the top of that range and enjoy being wrong. The one thing worth watching is a chance of thundery breakdowns around Thursday and Friday, which in August tend to arrive fast, empty the sky for an hour and clear off.

What to pack: nothing you would not already have, but do think about the nights. With lows around 25°C the flat will not cool down on its own, so if your room has a fan rather than air conditioning, ask for a second one at reception on the first morning rather than the fourth. The sea is about 27°C, which is warmer than most British bathwater by the time you get in it, and remains the cheapest way to cool down in Benidorm.

❓ You Asked…

Q: How full is Benidorm right now, honestly?

Full. The hoteliers’ association has occupancy in Benidorm and the rest of the Marina Baixa at around 90 per cent for this weekend, with August as a whole forecast at about 92 per cent, and July closed at 92.1 per cent, up nearly three points on last year. That is roughly as busy as the resort gets. In practice it means restaurants worth eating in want booking a day ahead rather than an hour, the parks are best done at opening rather than at eleven, and the sunbeds on Levante go before nine. It also means the town is in a good mood, which is not nothing.

Q: What do the beach flags actually mean, and can I really be fined?

Green is swim, yellow is caution and stay shallow, red is do not go in. Red is not advice. Benidorm’s beach ordinance prohibits bathing while the red flag is flying, and if a lifeguard or an officer tells you to come out and you do not, they can put in a report that starts a penalty file. Penalties for it across Spain are commonly quoted at €1,500, and up to €3,000 for anyone daft enough to do it twice, which is a lot of sangria for a swim you did not enjoy. Purple, which people miss, means something unpleasant in the water: usually jellyfish. And the flag applies to everything on the water, not just to swimmers. More on that below.

🔥 Hot Topic

If the Flag Is Red, the Boat Should Stay In

A 66‑year‑old British woman died last week after a parasailing trip off Levante went wrong. She was in the air with a 47‑year‑old man at around ten to seven in the evening when the rope connecting the parachute to the boat parted, and the pair came down on the rocks below the Cola del Caballo, towards Tío Ximo. She was resuscitated at the scene and died later at the Marina Baixa hospital in Villajoyosa. He was taken to Sant Joan with multiple injuries. The Guardia Civil are investigating, including how the rope came to break, and it would be wrong to guess at that before they report.

One detail in the reporting deserves saying out loud, carefully, because it has not been confirmed: several accounts state that a red flag had gone up shortly before, the conditions having turned. If that stands up, it is the part that should trouble people.

Here is my view. The flag system in this country is well run and taken seriously, but it is aimed squarely at swimmers. A holidaymaker who paddles out under a red flag is breaking a municipal ordinance and can be fined. A commercial operator taking paying customers 40 metres into the air behind a boat sits in a different regulatory world, one made of licences, insurance and inspections, and the flag on the beach is not the thing that stops them. That is the wrong way round. The people with the least ability to judge the conditions are the ones being sold the ride.

Until somebody in an office in Valencia joins those two things up, the job falls to you, which is unsatisfactory but true. Look at the flag before you hand over the money. Look at the state of the ropes and the harness, and at whether the crew are wearing anything themselves. Ask when the kit was last checked and watch how the question is received. A good operator will answer it cheerfully. And if the sea has got up since you booked, take the refund and go tomorrow. Nobody has ever regretted the parascend they did not do.

💡 Tip of the Week

How to Actually Get Into a Free Event

Three of this week’s best nights cost nothing, and all three are limited by space rather than by tickets, which catches people out every summer. There is no list, no booking and no queue in any recognisable sense. There is simply a point at which the council decides the terrace, the garden or the beach is full.

So: arrive 45 minutes early, and an hour for the garden at l’Hort de Coló, which holds only about a hundred and opens its doors at quarter to nine. Take something to sit on for the beach film, because the sand is comfortable for roughly eleven minutes. Do not drive to the castle, there is nowhere to leave a car up there and never has been. Eat first, since none of these venues will feed you. And if you get up there and it is already shoulder to shoulder, the Old Town is forty seconds away and full of bars with the door open. Losing the plan is not the same as losing the evening.

🤔 Did You Know?

Look inland from the beach and you will see the great notch cut out of the Puig Campana, the mountain behind Finestrat. The legend says the giant Roldán made it. In one telling he swung his sword in battle and missed, taking the top off the peak. In the kinder version, his love was cursed to die at sunset, so he hacked a window out of the ridge to let the light through for a few minutes longer. Either way the lump of rock he dislodged flew into the sea and landed as the island you can see off Levante. The nearby town’s name comes from the same idea: finestra, a window. Fishermen really did use the gap to steer themselves home.

Geologists have had a look, as geologists will, and the rock in the island does not match the rock in the mountain, so the story does not survive contact with a hammer and a hand lens. On the 30th of this month, three hundred swimmers will set off from that island and swim back to the port, which is one way of settling the argument.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Two or three names, that’s all — if you know somebody who runs a business here, forward them this email or reply with their name. The card grows or it doesn’t, and that bit is up to all of us.

⭐ Swimmers — entries for the island crossing on Sunday 30 August are open through Chip Levante, capped at 300, over‑18s, and everyone must tow a marker buoy.

⭐ Nominate a bar — Wee Mo’s tip‑off about the euro pint at Uncle Ron’s went down better than anything I have written all year. If you have found one, send it over.

⭐ Get the card on your phone before you fly — open it once at home, add it to your home screen, and it will be waiting when you land.

⭐ Join the chat — our Facebook group is the friendliest corner of Benidorm online. Come and say hello.

The Beatles at the castle on Wednesday, a film on the sand on Friday, powder paint at the zoo on Saturday, and two towers that get to keep standing. Next week: the run‑up to the island swim, the Beach Festival at the Bali, and, with any luck, a longer list of businesses on your card.

Thanks for reading. Pass it on to anyone with Benidorm on their mind, and if that person happens to run a bar, so much the better.

Until next time — keep the sun on your face and the sangria cold. ☀️

— The Benidorm Bulletin Team