British family staying at Rosaleda hotel in 50s-60s enjoyed bathing on Poniente beach caught on camera. Andrew Atkinson reports.
Dutch businessman Wim Kuipers has donated 86 photographs of Benidorm between 1959-62 by a British tourist.
He came across them in an album whilst he was looking for material on the historical heritage of Torremolinos and El Ejido.
Kuipers, to recover the historical heritage of both Andalusian municipalities, has led to a unique finding on the history of Benidorm in the late 50s-1960s seen through the eyes of an English tourist.
Kuipers has been working for more than four decades to recover the historical heritage of Torremolinos and El Ejido.
In his eagerness to document the tourist history of both municipalities, he acquired an album containing up to 86 photographs of a British family’s vacation in the Spanish Mediterranean.
“Among the pages of the album he located several sheets of images captured in Benidorm in a period between 1959 and 1962,” said Councillor for Historical Heritage, Ana Pellicer.
The Dutch businessman was fascinated by those photographs that fate casually placed in his hands.
In them you can see some of a personal nature and others of landscapes and places in Benidorm.
“We know that this British family was staying at the Rosaleda hotel and that during their stay they toured the municipal food market that was installed on Martínez Oriola and Costera del Barco streets.
They enjoyed bathing on the Poniente beach, and walked through the Tomás Ortuño and Carreró dels Gats streets and visited the port.
Determined that they should not fall into oblivion, Wim Kuipers contacted Benidorm Archive to offer the material selflessly, a generous gesture that stems from his vocation to safeguard heritage.
Added to the Municipal Archive of Benidorm are 86 black and white images taken in the early years of the Benidorm’s tourism development.
“This collection provides unpublished images of Benidorm that contribute to testify to the evolution of our city in recent decades and to recover our recent past”, said Pellicer.
In addition to the undoubted informative value, this donation contains a story of chance and altruism, whose protagonist is Wim Kuipers himself and which also deserves to be told.
Kuipers donation is not the first of significant historical value. It is added to the one carried out at the end of 2021 by the German citizen Maximiliam Greeven, who gave the City Council video footage of family vacations in Benidorm at the end of the 50s and also the enormous patrimony bequeathed by Cristina Boissiè “All these finds contribute to increasing the documentation and material on Benidorm of the last century and, with it, delving into the study and analysis of the evolution of our city, which has now become a benchmark tourist destination,” said Pellicer.
The material donated by Wim Kuipers is now available to researchers and in the near future it will also be available to the general public once the launch of the new management and consultation programme for the Archive, currently in the phase of implementation.
