The Benidorm Bulletin — Issue 75 | 30 August – 6 September 2026

From the Editor

September starts on Tuesday, and it starts loudly. Twenty thousand people are expected in this town for Pride, eighteen floats will come down Levante on Saturday afternoon, and the heat has quietly booked itself back in for the middle of the week just to make sure nobody gets complacent. Thursday looks like thirty-six degrees. Bring a hat, and bring a sensible pair of shoes, because you are going to walk further than you think.

Two other things in this issue that are not the usual furniture. The first is a letter. I get several of these every week and I have never once printed one, which on reflection is daft, because they are the best thing in my inbox and they are certainly better written than most of what I put in front of you. So this week there is a letter from Tracey, and my answer to it, and if that goes down well it stays.

The second is a piece of housekeeping near the bottom, and I would rather tell you about it in advance than have you find out by no longer receiving this. It concerns people who never open it. Read that bit if you read nothing else.

Eighteen Floats, Eighteen Parties, and a Town With Ideas Above Its Station

Benidorm Pride runs from Tuesday to Sunday, the council expects more than twenty thousand people, and the organiser has started saying the word EuroPride out loud.

This is the sixteenth Benidorm Pride and it lands on Tuesday 1 to Sunday 6 September. The council and the organisers presented the programme last Wednesday and put the expected number at more than twenty thousand visitors, most of them coming in from elsewhere in Spain and from abroad specifically for it. Eighteen parties across six days. Eighteen floats in the parade. It is, by a comfortable margin, the biggest single event in this town’s September.

The shape of the week goes like this. Tuesday and Wednesday belong to the Old Town, where the bars run their own free parties and keep going until five in the morning. Thursday brings a pool party and the Divas Disco. Friday is the White Party at the Julio Iglesias auditorium in the Parc de l’Aigüera, with an after-party at Rockstar afterwards for anyone still standing. Saturday is the big one. And Sunday the Old Town closes it out the way it opened it, free and until five.

The parade sets off at half past four on Saturday afternoon from the Rincón end of Levante, works its way along the seafront and finishes at the auditorium, where the main stage runs into the night with DJs and live performances. The drag queens Kika Lorace and La Prohibida are on the bill. The parade is free, the main stage is free, and the bar parties in the Old Town are free. The ticketed parties are handled through the festival’s own channels, and I would sort that out before you fly rather than on the day.

The interesting line came from the organiser, Santos Torres, who said out loud what has clearly been sitting in a drawer for a while: that he can imagine Benidorm hosting EuroPride one day, as Madrid and Barcelona have. Benidorm Pride has recently joined InterPride through its links with the Barcelona and Seville prides, which is the sort of unglamorous procedural step that these bids actually turn on. The events councillor, Jesús Carrobles, made the more predictable point about the economic impact across six days of full bars and full restaurants, and he is not wrong either.

My own view is that the EuroPride talk is less far-fetched than it sounds, and for the least romantic reason imaginable: beds. Benidorm has more hotel rooms than almost anywhere in Spain, an Old Town gay quarter of some thirty bars sitting inside a few hundred square yards, an auditorium in a park, and a tram that runs to Alicante. Cities bidding for EuroPride usually have the enthusiasm and are short of the plumbing. This town has always been the other way round. If it ever happens, nobody will say it out loud, but Benidorm will have won it on room count.

What this means for you:

• Saturday afternoon on Levante will be impassable from about four o’clock. If you have a table booked, walk, and leave early
• The Old Town will be busy every night from Tuesday, and loud until five on several of them. Wonderful if you want it, worth knowing if you don’t
• Everything on the street — the parade, the main stage, the bar parties — costs nothing to walk up to and watch
• If you are here with children, see the question further down. The short answer is that it is fine

☀️ What’s On This Week

Sunday and Monday are the calm. From Tuesday the town does not stop until the following Monday morning, and on Saturday two entirely different crowds occupy two ends of the same square mile.

Also on: the water parks and the two Natura parks are into their September hours now that the schools here are back, which in practice means shorter queues and the same sunshine. Sunday and Monday are the two days this week to do anything that normally involves standing in a line.

Coming Up: the rest of September, which is the month a lot of you quietly prefer — warm sea, cooler nights, fewer sunbeds under towels at half past eight in the morning. I have put the whole month’s Old Town calendar in one place: What’s On in Benidorm Old Town, September 2026.

🍺 Where to Wet Your Whistle

All three are in the Old Town this week, because that is where the town is going to be.

The tapas run: Pintxos Aurrera, on Costera del Hostal, in the covered stretch at the bottom of Tapas Alley. It opened in 1991 and was the first of what is now nine restaurants in the Aurrera group, and it is the one to start with. The cooking is Basque rather than Valencian — morcilla, tortilla, gulas with prawns, egg with pimiento, cheese, a great deal of good bread — and the trays on the counter are changed constantly, with the hot ones cooked in front of you. Reckon on somewhere around three and a half euros a pintxo — the group’s own published figures are lower than that, but they have not caught up with the bar. It is not the cheapest room in the Old Town and it is worth it.

Two things worth knowing before you go in. You order from a sheet. Ask at the counter, you get a printed list, you tick what you want, you say where you are sitting and you hand it back. They cook it and bring it over. That catches people out, because the trays are all sitting there in front of you and the instinct is to point at them or help yourself. Tick the sheet. And second: if there are a few of you, order the cider by the bottle for the table rather than a glass each. It is a proper Basque way to drink it, it is far better value, and on a warm night it is the best thing on the list. Go at nine, and go hungry — by half past it will be three deep at the bar.

The plate to order: La Mejillonera, which does mussels and does very little else, on the sound principle that this is enough. Marinera, in a sauce, with a squeeze of lemon, taken standing up with a beer, and the shells go in the bucket at your feet. Reckon on twenty to twenty-five euros a head. That is a proper Spanish plate of food in the middle of the most touristed square mile on this coast, and it is the answer to anyone who tells you the Old Town is all fish and chips now.

Read this bit if you have been before: it has moved. It is no longer on the alley. It is about twenty yards further back, inside the little shopping centre, and if you go to the old door you will stand there wondering whether it has shut down. It hasn’t. Walk on and go in.

The Pride one: DD’s, on Calle de Santa Faz, which is coffee and a quiet corner in the afternoon and cocktails and a great deal of noise by midnight. Santa Faz is one of the handful of streets — with Alacant, Quatre Cantons, Palma and San Miguel — that make up the Old Town’s gay quarter, some thirty bars inside a few hundred yards, and it is where the free Pride parties actually happen rather than where the posters say they do. Everyone is welcome all week, which is worth stating plainly for anyone hovering at the end of the street wondering whether they would be intruding. You would not be. Go and have a drink.

🎭 Tonight’s Entertainment

Forget the strip for a minute. Pride week is the one week of the year when the best room in Benidorm is a small one in the Old Town, and the venue to know about is Klee Kafee, which has been doing drag cabaret since 1994 and is the oldest of its kind in the town. Free entry, live singing rather than miming, resident performers who have been at it for years, and a room so small that ten is the biggest group they will take. It is over-18s and it is properly adult in tone. They close on Mondays. Ring ahead this week or you will not get in — there is a Pride crowd of twenty thousand in town and that room holds a fraction of a fraction of it.

Around it, the rest of the quarter runs its own free nights all week — Almirante on Calle de la Palma does drag, and Santa Faz has DD’s and Brief Encounter within a few doors of each other. None of it is ticketed and none of it needs planning. You walk up the street and pick the doorway with the noise coming out of it.

Now, if the strip is more your thing, here is the one venue on it doing something genuinely different. Jail Rock is not running tributes to whoever is in the charts. It is running mod, ska, northern soul and reggae, most nights, back to back: Reggae Man on Sunday and Monday, Soultown on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday, Rude Girl SKA on Tuesday, and Carnaby Street closing it out at eleven most nights of the week. If you were ever near a scooter, a parka or a Wigan Casino all-nighter, that is your week sorted.

And for a night where you do not have to choose, The Benidorm Palladium runs a full variety bill in one room: Gareth Fulton’s comedy hypnotist show first, Levi G’s comedy drag at ten, Gary George doing stand-up late on, and an adult show after midnight. Four completely different acts, one seat, no walking. Sunday through Thursday it runs to that shape.

The filed listings run out after Thursday, which every year means the opposite of what it looks like. Friday and Saturday of Pride week are the busiest two nights the venues will have all month, and typing up a calendar is the last thing on anybody’s mind. Ask whoever pulls your first pint. And take the printed start times as a rough guide rather than gospel — the boards outside are always right and the internet often isn’t.

☀️ Weather Watch — Turn of the Month

Last week’s relief was temporary, as the locals said it would be. The models have the weekend and Monday around thirty, Tuesday a touch cooler and cloudier, and then the heat walks straight back in for the middle of the week: thirty-four on Wednesday, close to thirty-six on Thursday, still in the low thirties on Friday. It eases back to about thirty for Saturday, which is a small mercy for eighteen floats and several thousand people on an unshaded promenade. No rain worth the name in the whole eight days.

What to pack: a hat you will actually wear and shoes you can stand up in for three hours. Thursday at thirty-six degrees is not beach weather so much as shade-and-water weather, and the mistake every year is made by people who plan a full day out on the hottest afternoon of the week because they booked the holiday in February. Do the walking early, do nothing between two and five, and come back out at seven when the town does. The sea is still around twenty-seven degrees and is the most reliable air conditioning in Benidorm.

❓ You Asked…

Q: We’re there with two grandchildren next week and I’ve just realised it’s Pride. Should we have booked a different week?

No, and you have accidentally booked the best week. A Pride parade is a street carnival: floats, music, colour, several thousand people in a very good mood on a seafront in the afternoon sunshine. Children love it, and there will be plenty of other families on that promenade doing exactly what you are doing. Stand on Levante from about four on the Saturday and let them wave at the floats. What is not for children is what happens after midnight, and that takes care of itself, because it happens in bars and clubs in a different part of town and is exactly as visible to a seven-year-old as any other nightclub is. The only real planning you need to do is around the crowds: get to your table early, do not try to cross the seafront between four and seven, and take water.

Q: I booked September because I was told it would be cooler. Have I made a mistake?

You have not, but the first week is going to test your faith. What you were told is true of the month as a whole and especially of the second half of it; what it is not is a promise that the heat ends on a particular Tuesday because the calendar says so. This week is the last shove of summer, with thirty-four and thirty-six degrees in the middle of it, and then September behaves itself. The nights are the real change and they change first: by the middle of the month you will be reaching for something with sleeves at eleven at night, which nobody in this town has done since May. September also brings the gota fría season, when a cold pocket high up meets a sea that has been storing heat since spring and drops a great deal of rain in a very short time. Nothing like that is in this week’s forecast. When it does come it is usually a day, not a fortnight, and it clears to something spectacular.

🔥 Hot Topic

Benidorm Is Giving a Tourism Award to McDonald’s

The council announced its Ciudad de Benidorm tourism awards on Thursday, to be handed over at a civic do on Friday 25 September for World Tourism Day. The winners are the Benidorm Half marathon, the coach firm Autocares Grupo Benidorm, the gift-shop chain ALE-HOP, and McDonald’s España, for an advertising campaign. There is also a special mention for Antonia Aguilar Masanet, who owns the Hotel Palmeral and has spent a working life in the trade here.

I can hear the groan from here, and I am going to defend three of the four.

The Half is obvious and deserved. The coach company moves the people who make everything else possible. And ALE-HOP, which everyone sneers at, is a better story than the sneerers know. It was started in 2001 by Vicent Grimalt, a young man from Gata de Gorgos, an inland village up past Dénia known mainly for wickerwork. First shop on Calle Paz in Valencia. There are now over three hundred and thirty of them across Spain, Portugal, Italy and Croatia, and around two thousand people work for the company. Every one has a life-size plastic cow at the door with a bell round its neck, and the ringing of that bell as a child goes past is, whether we admit it or not, part of the soundtrack of a Spanish holiday. That is not a tourism trinket. It is a Valencian family business that beat every high-street chain in Britain at their own game and never bothered opening here.

Which leaves McDonald’s. And no, I cannot make that one work. A global corporation is being given a civic honour by a Spanish town for running an advert. McDonald’s did not build anything here, did not risk anything here, and will not notice the trophy. Meanwhile the woman who has run a hotel in this town for decades gets a special mention, which is the polite way of saying fifth.

That is the bit that grates. Not that Benidorm is unserious — it has never pretended otherwise and its lack of pretension is precisely why forty years of sneering has failed to dent it. It is that a town with more independent hoteliers, bar owners and second-generation family businesses than almost anywhere on this coast had four awards to give and spent one of them on a burger advert. There were better candidates on Calle Santo Domingo. Some of them have been open since before the campaign’s creative director was born.

💡 Tip of the Week

The Ninety Minutes Almost Nobody Claims

The seafront will be shut to traffic on Saturday afternoon, so this is the week to know how the buses and trams actually work. And there is one rule that saves more money than all the others put together, which is that changing buses is free if you validate again within ninety minutes. Almost nobody does it. People pay twice for one journey all fortnight and never find out.

The rest of it, briefly. A single from the driver is €2. The BUS card costs €2 to buy and brings the fare down to €1.50 a journey, so it pays for itself on the fourth trip and it is the card that unlocks the free transfer. Ignore the tourist passes — €12 for 24 hours, €24 for 72, €48 for a week — unless you intend to spend your holiday riding buses for pleasure. On the tram, Benidorm to Alicante is €2.80 one way and €4.80 return, but the Bono 10 card is the one to have: €6 for ten two-zone journeys, which works out at about sixty céntimos a ride. The card itself is €2 and the discounted pricing is in place until the end of December.

Taxis are metered and honest, and it helps to know which meter you are on. From seven in the morning to nine at night it is €3.60 to start and around €1.02 a kilometre, so a typical three-kilometre run across town is about €7. After nine, at weekends and on public holidays it goes to €4.25 to start and €1.16 a kilometre, so the same trip is eight and up. A fifth passenger is €3, and there is a €2.23 supplement to Terra Mítica and Terra Natura. If the driver quotes you a flat fare before you set off in town, that is not how it works here.

I have put every fare, route and card in one place, with the things nobody tells you: Benidorm buses, trams and taxis — what it all costs.

🤔 Did You Know?

The park where the Pride main stage goes up was designed by one of the most celebrated architects Spain has produced. The Parc de l’Aigüera is the work of Ricardo Bofill, built in the late 1980s: a hundred and twenty thousand square metres of neoclassical avenue running in a straight line from the town hall down to the tram tracks, with two open-air auditoriums set into it. The small one is named for the composer Óscar Esplá and seats about five hundred. The big one is named for Julio Iglesias and the tourist board puts it at four thousand. It cost two thousand million pesetas, which is somewhere around twelve million euros in today’s money, and it was spent by a town that at the time was still best known in Britain for chips.

If the name does not mean much, this will: Bofill is also the man behind La Muralla Roja, the red labyrinth of stairs and terraces above the sea at Calpe, twenty minutes up the coast, which has spent the last decade being photographed by every design magazine and film crew in Europe. The same hand that made the internet’s favourite building also laid out the park where twenty thousand people will dance on Saturday night, between a bullring at one end and a town hall at the other. Benidorm’s reputation for having no architecture is doing an enormous amount of work it has not earned.

Community Noticeboard

⭐ Walk the murder trail before the finale — all nine real locations, in the order to do them, mapped here. Free, and it fills an afternoon.

⭐ Start your countdown — put your flight date in and it lives on your phone’s home screen, counting down and nagging you about your passport. Free, ninety seconds, here.

⭐ Send me a letter — the one at the top of this issue is the first I have printed and I would like it not to be the last. Just reply to this email.

⭐ Nominate a bar — reader tip-offs have produced the best picks this section has run all year, and I credit you by name when I use one.

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

Twenty thousand people and eighteen floats, a letter from Tracey who has never been here and is already asking the right questions, thirty-six degrees on Thursday, a line of euro coins down an Old Town street, and a park by a world-famous architect that most people walk through without looking up. Next week: September proper, and the beginning of the best six weeks of the year.

Thanks for reading. Pass it on to anyone with Benidorm on their mind — and if you have been meaning to reply to one of these for months, this is the week to do it.

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

— The Benidorm Bulletin Team