GlynOn the corner where Avenida de Alcoy meets Avenida de Bilbao, a few minutes from the Levante sand, there is now a Five Guys. It opened in June 2025, took 260 square metres of floor space with a 130-square-metre terrace, seats better than 110 people and arrived with more than 60 permanent jobs attached. It is the company’s third site in the Valencian Community after Valencia in 2018 and Alicante in 2021, and Spain is now Five Guys’ second-largest market in Europe after the UK.
Popeyes got here first. Its Benidorm branch on Calle de Valencia opened in June 2023, with another on Avenida Rei Jaume I. The Benidorm and Sant Joan openings together were reported as a three-million-euro investment carrying 60 jobs between them. McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King, of course, have been part of the furniture for years.
So that is five of the world’s biggest fast food brands, all trading within walking distance of one another, in a town of roughly 70,000 permanent residents.
Here is a number to sit with. At the Five Guys on Alcoy, a two-patty burger is €10.95 and a small chips €4.75. Call it €15.70 for burger and chips, eaten off a tray. The menú del día in Benidorm this year runs at roughly €15 to €20: a starter, a main, a pudding or coffee, with bread and a drink included, brought to a table by somebody who works there all year.
The same money. Two completely different lunches. Which of them represents value is, more or less, the whole argument.
The case that something is being lost
The most obvious objection is about sameness. A seafront that could be any seafront is a seafront with no particular reason to visit. Benidorm’s position has always rested on being cheap, warm and reliably itself. Strip out the second half of that and you are competing on price alone against every other resort in the Mediterranean, which is not a fight anybody wins for long.
Then there is the rent ratchet, which carries the most weight and gets the least attention. A multinational can pay more for a corner unit than a family business can, because it is buying visibility across a whole market rather than a livelihood. Once one such deal is done, it resets what every landlord on that street believes their unit is worth. The independent two doors down is not outcompeted on food. They are outcompeted on the lease.
There is the question of where the money goes. Takings from a family bar tend to circulate locally: the owner banks in town, buys from local suppliers, employs neighbours. A franchise sends a slice up the chain to a head office that is not in Benidorm and not in Spain. How big that slice is depends on the operator, and it is not nothing.
And there is the quiet one, which is skills. Nobody learns to make arroz a banda standing at a fryer station. The knowledge held in a kitchen where somebody’s grandmother taught somebody’s mother is not written down anywhere, and when that kitchen closes it does not reopen.
The case that this is not decline at all
Benidorm’s real problem has never been culture. It has been seasonality. A town built on six-month contracts and winter shutters cannot hold on to its young people, and the families who leave in October do not always come back in April. Five Guys put more than 60 permanent posts on the Levante. Popeyes and its Sant Joan sibling another 60. Those are year-round jobs with contracts and payslips in a labour market that has historically offered neither, and that deserves a serious answer from anyone arguing the other way.
There is the honest matter of what visitors actually want. Benidorm did not discover the full English breakfast in 2023. It has been selling British food to British visitors since the 1960s, which is rather longer than most of the things we now call traditional. The Levante has been giving people what they ask for for sixty years. Objecting now, at the precise moment the food happens to be American rather than British, is a position that needs examining.
There is the practical case. A family of four with a fussy seven-year-old, a teenager with a nut allergy and a budget to make last until Thursday knows exactly what they are getting at a chain, exactly what it will cost, and that nobody will go hungry. That is not cultural vandalism. That is a family managing their money.
And there is the uncomfortable possibility that the chains are a symptom rather than a cause. Commercial rents rise because a place is successful. Independents close for a dozen reasons, of which competition from a burger chain is rarely the main one: retirement without a successor, wage rises, energy bills, the sheer grinding difficulty of running a small hospitality business anywhere in Europe just now. The same thing has happened to the British high street, and Popeyes did not do that either.
The bit that complicates both arguments
Walk up into the Casco Antiguo and none of this has happened. Calle Santo Domingo still runs on small independent bars serving tapas at roughly three to five euros a plate. ABRECA, the local association of bars, restaurants and cafés, was founded in 1985 and still represents more than 200 businesses. The Old Town has not been colonised, and not because anyone protected it. The streets are too narrow, the units too small and the passing trade too seasonal for a chain to want them.
Which suggests the honest conclusion is neither of the clean ones. The chains have not taken Benidorm. They have taken the expensive, high-footfall frontage where the economics suit them, and left the rest alone. Whether that amounts to decline depends entirely on whether you thought the Levante strip was ever the cultural heart of anything.
Over to you
We are not going to tell you what to think about this one, partly because we do not have a settled view ourselves. Both arguments have real weight, and anyone who finds this an easy question probably has not looked properly at the other side.
So: is Benidorm losing something, or is it doing what it has always done and selling people what they want to buy? Tell us where you land. And if you have been coming here long enough to remember what stood on those corners before, we would very much like to hear it.
