Planning Development: Romanian Beach Tourism

A 1967 guidebook on the Romanian Black Sea Coast described Mamaia as a “resort of international interest” and proudly announced the construction of two new tramlines, which would connect the furthest point of the resort with Constanța, the main town in the region.¹⁰ In the 1960s, the Romanian Black Sea Coast, which stretches for 93.2 miles from Năvodari (a vacation camp for elementary and middle school students) in the north to Vama Veche (known for its nudist tourism) in the south, became better connected with the largest cities in Romania and even with some cities abroad through an electrified railway network and an airport. But it also became better connected regionally, with trams and buses connecting Constanța with the main resorts. The guidebook, published in Romanian (an English edition was published one year earlier)¹¹ emphasized that the enlargement of transportation infrastructure took place because the communist government wanted to turn Mamaia into a major resort, “one of the more modern in Europe and the largest on the Black Sea Coast.”¹² To further convince its readers, the guidebook gave the names of the newly built hotels, mostly seven- to ten-story buildings, and their facilities, which ranged from lodging and medical care to dance halls and sports amenities.¹³ As a result of government financing, Mamaia became not just an accumulation of hotels and restaurants, but an urban space where modern art installations and green spaces harmoniously mingled.¹⁴ Some architectural studies referred to Mamaia as “the park resort” because of its large green spaces.¹⁵ Modernity referred not only to buildings and landscapes but also a different attitude toward the human body. In stark contrast to the regime’s official prudishness, the 1967 guidebook highlighted a nudist beach located in the northern part of the resort.¹⁶ Notwithstanding the inflated jargon of official discourse, the guidebook presented Mamaia as a modern cosmopolitan resort.

Tourists were also impressed by Mamaia’s new look. A Romanian female tourist described the resort as “clean, with green spaces.” Because she first visited the resort in the mid-1960s, she managed to get a good idea about how it developed. “At first, the resort was small, but later when they built more hotels, it became a bit packed.” What stayed with her over the years was Mamaia’s buoyant feel and the possibility of having fun compared even to Bucharest, where she lived. “First of all, you could go to the bar … there was back then Melody Bar, with the program starting only at 11:00 p.m. You would pay an entrance fee, which included one drink, it was music and dancing, and a variety program for about one hour. Everybody, women or men, had to dress up; they wouldn’t let you in otherwise.”¹⁷

Mamaia’s developers had a specific public in mind when planning the resort. Mamaia was built as a modern space to welcome prospective foreign tourists, especially those from capitalist countries. Nic. C., a guide with ONT–Littoral in the 1970s, recalled that it was impossible for Romanian tourists to find a room in a hotel in Mamaia, as “all of them were booked by foreigners.”¹⁸ This policy frustrated Romanian tourists. In the rare cases when they could find a place in a hotel in Mamaia, they had to deal with the state’s preference for foreign tourists. Marioara V., an accountant at Electrofarm Factory in Bucharest and a regular visitor to the Black Sea Coast from 1966, remembers how she and her party were asked to interrupt their sojourn and take an unplanned but free one-day trip to the Danube Delta, a region located 80 km north of Mamaia along the Black Sea Coast.¹⁹ This happened because a group of foreign tourists arrived, but no rooms were available for them: “A large group of foreign tourists arrived and we were told to go to the reception [desk]. And at the reception desk we were informed that we were going to be checked out for one night and we would visit Delta Dunării. They said that ‘we are offering you a free trip!’ ”²⁰

Yet Marioara refused to follow this request and rushed into the hotel director’s office to make a complaint:

I put on my fancy hat and I went to the director. “Ma’am, let me explain to you,” he said. I started to play the fool. “What is that ‘Delta’? I don’t know any Delta. I came to the seaside! If you check me out from the hotel, you pay me the ticket and I go back to Bucharest.” Like I didn’t know where they wanted to take us! They were doing this quite often. They didn’t have enough space for foreign tourists and then the only solution they were left with was to kick out the Romanians!²¹

She was allowed to keep her room, but the rest of the group took the offer and spent the night in the Danube Delta. This almost comical occurrence illustrates the tension between the socialist promise of vacations for all and the insistence of the Romanian socialist state on developing international tourism on the seaside for foreign tourists to obtain capital. At a lower level, it also suggests a clear dysfunctionality of the hotel management and the ONT–Littoral, which simply sold more tourist packages than available rooms. But this episode reflects the unexpected power of a tourist who refused to be kicked out and asked to be treated like a client in a system that scholars often describe as rigid and authoritarian.

International tourism in Romania thrived after the de-Stalinization process began and led to a slight improvement in East–West relationships at the end of the 1950s.²² Both processes coincided with the rise of beach tourism in Europe and worldwide. International tourism had become a reality, which socialist countries regarded as a new opportunity to compete with “the West” and to increase their economic performance. The world boom of beach tourism and the new phase in the Cold War, which stressed competition with a focus on consumer goods and not military capacities, led to a substantial investment program on the Romanian Black Sea Coast centered on Mamaia and Eforie as of the late 1950s.²³ Hotel planning was the responsibility of a team of architects led by Cezar Lăzărescu, with Hotel București (nowadays the luxurious Hotel Iaki) the first major hotel to be opened on the Romanian seaside after World War II, in 1957.²⁴ Yet in 1959, the pace of building slowed. Several new hotels as well as a casino area and camping facilities in Mamaia were supposed to open on June 1, 1959, to welcome tourists for the 1959 tourist season. All of the rooms were already booked. But in April 1959, Gheorghe Teodorescu, director of ONT–Carpathians, warned that these facilities might not be ready on that date due to delays in getting approvals, shortages of building materials, or sheer lack of money.²⁵ Teodorescu suggested making financial incentives for the Constanța Building and Hydrotechnical Construction Trust, the institution in charge of building the hotels, and its workers so as to boost their enthusiasm. An additional payment of 200,000 lei—quite a large amount at the time—was requested for the project to be completed on time.²⁶

Despite the obvious difficulties, progress was made, and at the end of the 1960s the communist regime bragged about its seaside hotel capacity, which could accommodate 120,000 people (equal to the 1967 population of Constanța).²⁷ Alongside hotel-building in Mamaia, the southern resorts of Eforie Nord and Sud began to develop their accommodation capacity at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s.²⁸ Thus, the lodging capacity increased from 500–600 beds in 1941 to 3,000 in 1957 and to 10,000 in 1965.²⁹ The building of Hotel Europa in 1966 in Eforie Nord, a twelve-floor modernist building, suggested that both Eforie Nord and Mamaia would serve foreign tourists.³⁰ But a new ideological dilemma arose after representatives of the trade unions complained that prices on the seaside had become prohibitive for Romanian tourists.³¹ As a result, Nicolae Ceaușescu proposed lowering the prices in Eforie Nord and Eforie Sud, except for at the Hotel Europa, and selling vacation packages mainly in the domestic market and to the trade unions.³² The subsequent rise of domestic tourism, coupled with an increasing number of foreign tourists, meant that Mamaia’s hotel space could barely cope with the demand. Both tourism and party officials became aware that in order to preserve the promising start, new resorts had to be opened on the seaside.

The National Tourism Office (ONT), the Ministry of Commerce, and the local authorities in Constanța had been asked in 1966 to put together a plan for the systematic development of the seaside. The plan mentioned the urgency of building a new resort at the southern part of the seaside, near the Bulgarian border, but no concrete measures were taken. Only in 1968 did the ONT devise a concrete plan for building a new resort in Mangalia, a town 37 km south of Constanța.³³ This complex became the future Neptun-Olimp resort. As the plan had to be approved by the Central Committee, the ONT–Littoral provided a thorough report. The new seaside complex was to be built on 140 hectares, “mostly unproductive land that belonged to the nearby collective farm.”³⁴ The proposal outlined the advantages of the location “three kilometers away from Mangalia’s city center, but close to a forest, which increases the chances for successfully promoting the resort on the foreign market.”³⁵ Furthermore, the report stressed that the road between Mihail Kogălniceanu Airport and the area south of the seaside had to be improved in order to cope with the increased flow of tourists. The resort’s planned capacity was 18,000 beds, which was 6,000 more than in Mamaia. Most of the accommodation infrastructure consisted of two-star hotels (C category) housing 8,400 beds, while only 300 beds were in a four-star hotel (A category). This configuration was chosen to improve the new resort’s economic efficiency and because these were the accommodation patterns in the more developed tourist countries. Moreover, a detailed study of the external market served as a basis for planning the expansion of the resort. Because of its anticipated enlarged capacity, the report emphasized that “no new resorts would need to be built in the future, which will allow for a more pragmatic use of available financial and material resources.”³⁶ In this way, the planners attempted to follow Ceaușescu’s earlier directives. A year earlier, at another meeting on the building of Mangalia-Neptun resort, he pointed out that the construction work on the seaside should be kept at the lowest possible cost on the grounds that “these hotels are not built in Bucharest, or in Brașov, or other places, they are built on the seaside where they stay unoccupied for eight months.”³⁷

The cost of building the whole resort was less than 62 billion lei (around $340 million USD); the investment was supposed to be paid off in fifteen years. The Directorate for Planning, Architecture and Organization of Territory, which was subordinated to the People’s Council (Sfatul popular) in Constanța, was in charge of putting together the project plan (including systematization and hotel design), while the Ministry of Industrial Constructions was responsible for erecting the resort’s hotels and various other buildings.³⁸ Most materials and techniques were to be purchased from the domestic market, with just 7 percent (furniture and various technologies estimated at 4.2 billion lei) bought from abroad. Almost half of the materials purchased from abroad were from capitalist countries.³⁹ The ONT–Littoral’s report to the Central Committee emphasized that the building of Mangalia would be less expensive than that of Mamaia. It projected that the cost to build hotel rooms with the different food and beverage outlets would not exceed 46,400 lei ($2,577), compared to 55,000 lei for comparable construction in Mamaia.⁴⁰

When planning the resort, tourist officials aimed to meet “all tourists’ needs and demands.”⁴¹ Hence, the resort was dotted with commercial centers, cultural and entertainment spaces, sports facilities, clinics, and pharmacies. The planners stressed that building a tourist facility from scratch would allow them to harmoniously integrate lodging with other spaces. All hotels had a commercial area on the ground floor that sold products such as handmade items, beach products, toys, cosmetics, etc. Various shops, like tobacco shops; soda kiosks, cafés, day bars, bakeries, and brasseries; haberdasheries; shoe and footwear stores; and photo, sport, and music shops, were present in these hotels. The report mentioned that additional independent commercial areas would be built after 1970 “to cope with further demands.”⁴²

Building a resort from scratch presupposed the hiring of a large number of people. For the nonresident seasonal employees who just arrived at the seaside, the resort included a dormitory of 1,500 beds. Later, as some hotels remained open throughout the year, tourist workers who obtained permanent employment moved into individual apartments either in Mangalia or the nearby Neptun.⁴³ Thus, the settlement became a community rather than a hollow resort open only during the summer months, and the residents formed specific bonds and identities.

Like Mamaia ten years earlier, Mangalia and the surrounding resorts, Neptun-Olimp and Cap Aurora, were built primarily for foreign tourists. But as Doru B., a former bellboy at Hotel Doina in Neptun, now the hotel director, describes the resort as being divided between foreigners and Romanians: “It was filled with foreigners. Where I worked, at Doina, there were Belgians, French, and Germans. At Belvedere in Olimp were only Italians. Romanians were usually put in one-star hotels, or C category, how it was back then, run by the trade unions. Further away from the beach and not that swell compared to the others.”⁴⁴

Hotels were built farther away from the beach because a lake separated the beach area from the built space, but also because Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to have his own villa in Neptun. This was built along the shore, with a private beach and an enormous courtyard of around 100,000 square yards surrounded by cement walls. This building blocked the tourists’ access to the beach, so an alley that bypassed it was built. This was not necessarily to the likes of tourists traveling with families. The resort looked “nice but unwelcoming” to Marioara V., who visited Neptun in 1979 with her two little girls. She disliked the lack of commercial spaces,⁴⁵ “fewer than in Mamaia,” and the long distance to the beach. “I had a three-year-old, and imagine how hard it was to carry her to the beach.”⁴⁶ As in Mamaia, green spaces and modern hotels sprang up throughout the resort, but Neptun was also less accessible to ordinary tourists. The buses that connected Neptun with either Mangalia or Constanța were few and slow. “The closest railway station was in Mangalia, and from there, if you could afford it, you could take a cab or wait a couple of hours for the bus.”⁴⁷

The southern part of the Romanian seaside was isolated precisely because foreign tourists would arrive in the ONT–Littoral coaches (as most came in organized tours) or by car. Olimp and Cap Aurora, the nearby resorts, were primarily designed for well-to-do tourists or those with automobiles, as public transportation was sparse. The advantage of these locations was that the hotels were lined up along the beach.⁴⁸ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, seaside resorts also created some divisions between tourists from capitalist countries and those from socialist countries, including Romanian. Despite what one might expect, these divisions were not ideological but economical. Western tourists paid for tourist services at prices comparable with other low-cost tourist destinations, while tourists from socialist countries were charged based on special agreements reached within Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). This led to substantial differences between the prices paid by tourists from capitalist countries and those from socialist ones. For instance, while a Romanian would pay 9 lei per diem, a Westerner paid 800 lei per diem.⁴⁹ Part of this was explained by differences in the quality of accommodations and meals.

As the number of Western tourists at the seaside began to decline in the mid-to-late 1970s, international tourism generated fewer revenues, and the pressure to turn this sector into a profitable activity mounted.

Although the revenues of 1977 remained the same as the previous year, they amounted to only 76 percent of the plan figures.⁵⁰ Nor was the plan met when it came to tourists from socialist countries. Of the 96,000 tourists planned to arrive from Czechoslovakia, contracts were signed for only 67,000 tourists.⁵¹ Czechoslovakian tourists’ lack of interest in vacationing in Romania was due to a change in the Romanian Ministry of Tourism regulations that asked tourists to have their meals at the canteen, which came with an increase in price. Many socialist tourists came to the region planning to camp and preferred to prepare their own meals because it was cheaper, but also because it involved less social control. Hence, tourists from Czechoslovakia and other socialist countries shifted their attention to other tourist destinations. This was the conclusion of a report by the Romanian National Bank (BNR), which pinpointed this obligation as one of the main reasons for the decreased number of tourists from socialist countries. The same report noted that although this requirement was lifted for the second part of 1977, the number of tourists from neighboring socialist countries arriving still remained lower than expected.⁵²

The drop in the number of tourists to the Black Sea Coast from both capitalist and socialist countries worried Romanian officials, who acknowledged that the main reason for this situation was the increase in prices, which made Romania prohibitively expensive for some socialist tourists, but also for working-class tourists from capitalist countries.⁵³ Additionally, tourist services did not keep pace with the prices and many tourists complained about it. At the same time, as the price of vacationing in Romania increased, the cost in Spain, Italy, and France decreased as the currencies of these countries lost value against the Deutsche Mark, and West German tourists paid less for the same services.⁵⁴ Because West Germans were the most coveted tourists in Europe as they had more capital available, the competition between regions like the Romanian Black Sea Coast and the Spanish Costa del Sol deepened.⁵⁵

Romanian financial specialists put forth some solutions to overcome this crisis and to make the Romanian Black Sea Coast attractive again. A report of the BNR in September 1977 emphasized that “In order to improve tourist services on the Romanian seaside and to increase its status on the foreign markets, we believe some measures need to be adopted now when the contracts for next summer are negotiated and signed.”⁵⁶ Suggestions included only signing contracts for existing places in hotels and not for those that were planned to be built that year (and which might not be finalized); placing tourists in fewer hotels so that they would be occupied at full capacity and better equipped to meet foreign tourists’ standards; increasing the number of hotel rooms with queen- or king-size beds (most hotels on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, and especially in Mamaia, had twin beds so as to accommodate people who were not from the same family); encouraging restaurants to offer á la carte menus for all foreign tourists; and offering food vouchers to tourists that they could use at restaurants of their choice, so that restaurants and cafeterias could compete to offer better services and attract more clients. The report also recommended that tourist guides receive better pay and other career incentives so that they would be more engaged with guests; that bars and restaurants stay open later; and that hotels improve entertainment in their restaurants and clubs, as many had the same repertoire for years.⁵⁷

The report’s recommendations neatly recapped the main problems of tourism on the Romanian Black Sea Coast in the mid-to-late 1970s. Yet despite significant improvement in 1980, when 855,345 tourists from capitalist countries visited Romania (compared to 729,188 in 1975), their numbers dropped significantly in the coming years.⁵⁸ In 1983, tourist arrivals from these countries were less than half of what they were in 1981.⁵⁹ As the Council of Ministers noted in 1983, Romania had comparable, if not higher, tariffs for two-week vacation packages to more attractive beach destinations in Yugoslavia and Spain, which was not an incentive to tourists.⁶⁰ Moreover, the political inflexibility of the Romanian Communist Party’s (PCR) top leadership, especially of Nicolae Ceaușescu, did not help either. In 1983, a group of Greek tourists asked for a restaurant to stay open past 10:00 p.m., the regular closing time, during an Easter celebration that they were having in Constanța. Even this seemingly minor demand reached Nicolae Ceaușescu’s office, who denied it with the request “to follow the law.”⁶¹ In the end, few of the recommendations the specialists from the BNR made in 1977 to salvage Romanian tourism were fully put into practice.⁶²

Already by 1981, specialists from the Ministry of Tourism became aware that the main source of growth for Romanian tourism came from tourists from neighboring socialist countries. A January 1981 report about the preparation of the upcoming summer season, which the Ministry of Tourism first sent for approval to the Securitate, reflected the state authorities’ deep concern for preserving the growth of tourists from capitalist countries.⁶³ Although officials predicted that the number of tourists would increase by 13 percent compared to 1980, the report noted that tourists from socialist countries surge by 40 percent.⁶⁴ The higher proportion of socialist tourists on the Romanian Black Sea Coast in 1981 was evident when it came to lower tourism revenue. Tourists from capitalist countries were expected to bring in revenue of $69.3 million, an increase of 19.4 percent over the previous year, while tourists from socialist states were expected to spend around 19.5 million rubles, 46.1 percent more than in 1980.⁶⁵ This mirrored a change in the ability of tourists from socialist countries to spend money at the seaside, as they were less likely to spend their meager resources on trips within Romania or nearby countries, and they did not possess the coveted hard currencies. In order to show that the seaside was prepared to welcome these tourists, the Ministry of Tourism’s report highlighted the growing accommodation capacity on the seaside, which reached 135,000 beds (15,000 more than in 1967) in hotels, villas, etc., plus 30,000 beds in private houses.⁶⁶ This lodging capacity was large enough to accommodate 1.5 million Romanian and foreign tourists, of which 1.4 million were expected to visit during the high season (May 1—September 30). Yet, as enticing as these numbers sound, the hotels that were designed in the 1970s to welcome Western tourists were now occupied by the less economically desirable tourists from socialist countries or by Romanian tourists, which was not a reality the Romanian socialist regime was ready to fully accept.

Planning Development: Beach Tourism on the Spanish Costa Del Sol

In the mid-1950s, international tourism became the primary industry in the Spanish Costa del Sol.⁶⁷ This region, which stretches for about 186 miles between Cabo de Gata in Almería in the east and Punta de Tarifa in Cádiz in the west, welcomed at least half a million tourists in 1962.⁶⁸ It is its mild climate that makes Costa del Sol an attractive tourist destination, with temperatures in the winter that hover around 12–15 degrees Celsius and do not exceed 26 degrees Celsius in the summer.⁶⁹ Due to the influx of foreign tourists, many settlements transformed seemingly overnight from fishermen’s villages to tourist resorts. As a study about the Costa del Sol put together by the Ministry of Information and Tourism in 1962 put it, “The extraordinary boom attained by the Costa del Sol, especially around Málaga, has made the majority of villages and towns that foreign tourist stormed to become authentic cosmopolitan places, animated by a dynamic and diverse lifestyle.”⁷⁰ But before becoming a cosmopolitan place in the early 1960s, the built space of Costa del Sol went through a transformation as the number of hotels and restaurants mushroomed in the late 1950s.

Although by the mid-1950s the political isolation of Franco’s Spain had eased, the lack of proper and sufficient lodging facilities constrained the development of the tourist industry. Two types of accommodation predominated on the Costa del Sol in the early 1950s: guesthouses and small and medium hotels.⁷¹ As suggested by their names (e.g., Pension de Doña Elvira, Pension de Doña Carmen), most of the tourist establishments were small houses run by middle-aged women. By contrast, the hotels belonged to the local aristocracy, many of whom were closely connected with the royal family or the emerging entrepreneurial elite, who were linked to Franco and the Falangists. This is the story of Hotel Miramar in Málaga, which was inaugurated in 1926 by Alfonso XIII (1886–1931), and of the Hotel Marbella-Club, a sixteen-room hotel opened in 1954 by Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a notorious playboy and the godson of King Alfonso XIII. Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a “celebrated bon vivant, dancer-till-dawn, rally driver, hunter, and sportsman,”⁷² according to his obituary, he invited his royal friends to spend vacations in Marbella, a quiet, off-the-beaten-path fishing village. His personal relationship with Franco undoubtedly helped his success with Hotel Marbella-Club. He often bragged that “his projects were immune from planning permission or labor laws.”⁷³ Personal connections with Franco’s family played an essential role in the emerging tourist industry on the Costa del Sol (even more so than in other regions, as Franco himself was from Seville). Hotel Los Monteros, which opened in 1962 in Marbella, confirmed this trend. Despite being advertised as a family business, its owner, Ignacio Coca, was a wealthy banker and Franco’s brother-in-law.⁷⁴

Besides members of the aristocracy and influential financiers, another category of hotel owners, members of the new business elite, came into being at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. They had the necessary resources to buy either land or existing tourist establishments. Jose Luque Manzano, a native of Seville and the owner of a chocolate factory and an olive oil mill, purchased Pension de Doña Elvira in 1956 for 300,000 pesetas and opened Hotel Fuerte a year later. Although it had only thirty-two rooms, it was equipped with an elevator, the first on the Costa del Sol.⁷⁵ This hotel laid the foundation for the further business ventures developed by Manzano. He subsequently built a chain of six hotels, part of the Fuerte Group Hotels, spread out along the Mediterranean coast. The growth of Costa del Sol as a tourist destination came with a transfer of property from locals to business entrepreneurs who later built corporations. Another example was Jose Banús, a construction entrepreneur who, after quadrupling his investment from building the state-subsidized neighborhood of El Pilar in Madrid, shifted to tourist development on the emerging Costa del Sol. In 1962, Banús built a whole neighborhood in Marbella, suggestively called Nueva Andalucía (New Andalusia), composed of apartment buildings for tourists to buy or rent.⁷⁶ In the words of my Rafael F., a former hotel director in Marbella, the Francoist government made it almost a “patriotic duty” for locals to sell their land and properties with tourist potential to more prominent domestic or foreign entrepreneurs, as these transactions came with divisas.⁷⁷ This increased the prices of land and homes and, in the end, led to gentrification that did not always work in the local population’s favor. At the same time, as Rafael F. explains, when he started looking for a job in 1957, he needed the intervention of a family member to get one. Yet by 1959, finding a job in tourism was no longer a problem.⁷⁸

But although the number of lodging places grew, the pace was still insufficient to keep up with the number of tourists. The number of hotels soared from thirty-six in 1955 to eighty-six in 1962, a 373 percent increase. But demand continued to exceed supply because the number of tourists rose by 400 percent.⁷⁹ One issue was that hotels remained at a small capacity. By the late 1950s, most hotels had two or three floors and did not exceed forty rooms. The architectural style followed the traditional Andalusian peasant homes featuring white-painted buildings with inner patios. On the one hand, this approach was based on the ideology of Francoism, which favored the preservation of traditional peasant values, as these epitomized the “essence of the nation.”⁸⁰ On the other, this building style reflected an elitist view of tourism, which was supposed to cater mainly to a small elite. The physical distance between Costa del Sol and countries like France, Great Britain, and West Germany, from which Western tourists most often came, coupled with the high prices of plane tickets, made it difficult for middle-class tourists to reach Costa del Sol in the 1950s.⁸¹ Yet it was the middle class that drove much of the tourist boom of the 1960s, and hence Spain found that it required a different type of tourist establishment. Chain hotels run by large corporations became the solution to this shortcoming. Rafael F., who started as a receptionist and bellboy at Hotel Santa Clara in Torremolinos in 1957, recalls Málaga and its suburb, as filled with tourists, although the hotels were still insufficient.⁸² But he notes this was about to change with the opening of Pez Espada. “In 1959, I think, it was the first modern hotel built in Torremolinos near Santa Clara, called Pez Espada.”⁸³

And indeed, when it was opened in May 1959, Pez Espada left its viewers awestruck because of its size and excessive luxury. The seven-floor building had 138 rooms, seven apartments, and three bungalows and was staffed by two hundred employees. Although not built to accommodate tourists from the working or middle class, due to its impressive size, it was the first hotel on the Costa del Sol to meet the criteria for a mass tourism establishment. Most of the tourist brochures describing Pez Espada highlighted its guests’ prominence.⁸⁴ The hotel provided famous guests with a space where they could easily preserve their day-to-day habits, untouched by the daily realities of Torremolinos. It had restaurants, gardens, a nightclub, pools, and its own beach.

In 1962, two appointments heralded a change for tourism development. Following the appointments of Manuel Fraga as a minister of information and tourism and of Rodriguez Acosta, a native of Málaga, as head of the newly formed Sub-Secretariate of Tourism (it replaced the Dirección General de Turismo), mass international tourism soared on the Costa del Sol. New luxury and mass-market hotels opened, and so did campgrounds, as camping became a popular form of tourist lodging, especially for young and budget-conscious tourists. The hotel Melia Don Pepe, part of the Melia Group, an up-and-coming Spanish tourist corporation, opened in 1964. The Hilton Hotel opened its doors a year later in Marbella.⁸⁵ Other hotels that catered to middle-class tourists opened after 1962.

There was a stark contrast between luxury and more affordable hotels, and the tourists inhabiting them. The main hotels, erected both before and after 1962, were built to accommodate rich tourists, while the tourists from the middle and working classes found lodging in guesthouses, private homes, or campgrounds. Campgrounds catered to a particular type of international tourist, and the number of campers grew steadily from the early 1960s. Camping regulations had been in place since 1957, but only after 1962 were specific facilities set up. This physical separation among tourists reflected differences in wealth. But the sun and beaches were available to all.

While private entrepreneurs were quick to seize the opportunity to invest in tourism and were building hotels of various sizes, the state, especially local authorities, was slower to develop urban infrastructure. In 1955, an addendum to the Plan Nacional de Turismo (National Tourist Plan) for the first time employed the concept of a “zone of tourist interest.” The document defined this as an area fit for tourism, where the Spanish state planned to offer some incentives in the near future.⁸⁶ A couple of months later, the first Plan for the Tourist Promotion of Costa del Sol was put forward. This was also the first time Costa del Sol was mentioned in an official document. The plan did not prove to be effective because complaints about the lack of urban infrastructure were frequent. For example, in July 1959, inhabitants of Torremolinos wrote a letter to the city hall in Málaga asking for a reliable garbage collection service, as garbage was spread all over the resort and threatened to start an epidemic. They also lamented the lack of water and a sewage system.⁸⁷ The daily newspaper SUR routinely devoted a special section to letters addressed to the municipality in an attempt to force the town’s leaders to solve problems. Local authorities cited the need for more resources. Their argument was not without merit. A 1972 article in Desarrollo magazine authored by an official in the Ministry of Tourism hinted that authorities had closed their eyes to misconduct in their push to develop tourism in Spain: “There was no other solution than building the hotel in the middle of the beach, without roads, sewage systems, or phones, because there was no money to build a proper urban space.”⁸⁸

Even before 1962, the Spanish state worked on plans to develop the Costa del Sol region. The 1959 plan for “the systematization” of Costa del Sol aimed at “efficiently organizing that space which allowed for the exploitation of one of the most important resources for obtaining hard currencies: international tourism.”⁸⁹ Yet the actual implementation of the plan stalled for three years. Despite the central state’s efforts to develop a tourist infrastructure, local authorities in Málaga expressed skepticism about whether international tourism was necessary for their region and declared the sector “a luxury which does not justify the state’s involvement, neither socially nor economically.”⁹⁰

Following Fraga’s appointment, another study for the systematization of Costa del Sol was published in 1963. The author, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, was a Greek architect and engineer who ran Doxiadis Iberica S.A, a firm that had previously published a study on Costa Brava.⁹¹ The study cautioned about the dangers of unplanned development: “if this extended development, which is expected in the coastal area, is not carefully planned, [it] will cause numerous shortcomings, which in the end will affect the area.”⁹² Alongside these plans that attempted to systematize Costa del Sol, national legislation that sought to regulate the “areas of tourist interest” and coastal regions was enacted in 1963 and 1965, respectively. The distrust toward local authorities was obvious in the 1965 law for coastal regions, which mandated that “land concessions or building permits on the beach has to be pre-approved by the Ministry of Information and Tourism.”⁹³

At the same time, local authorities began to realize that tourism could become a profitable business for the region and they took measures to improve the general aspects of the area. A report titled List of Activities Performed by the City Hall of Málaga in Order to Develop Tourism reflected this new attitude, but it also had elements of propaganda. The document praised the city hall in Málaga for taking a number of actions to resolve issues such as uncleanliness, the poor quality of roads and sidewalks, and poor street lighting in its attempt to increase tourism.⁹⁴ Residential trash removal, long a demand of residents, was introduced, but only after a swine flu epidemic hit the town in 1961. In addition, public garbage bins were installed and sidewalks and roads were repaved, as the study carefully pointed out.⁹⁵

Despite these outward improvements, issues such as a lack of proper sanitation, poor infrastructure, and general underdevelopment lingered. In 1966, another team, consisting of an architect, an engineer, a lawyer, and an economist, worked for ten months to come up with a more detailed plan for the tourist systematization and promotion of Costa del Sol.⁹⁶ The study paid particular attention to “economic, juridical, urban, infrastructural, and environmental factors” that affected the development of Costa del Sol.⁹⁷ Addressing and improving these factors would enhance the income potential of the region, which brought in 6 percent of Spain’s total tourist revenue. At the time, Costa Brava and the Balearic Islands accounted for the most revenue.⁹⁸ The fact that the region brought in more than $70 million made it one of the most profitable areas for tourism in Spain. But the plan indicated that disorderly construction, the hazy legal status of past and present construction projects, and administrative inertia threatened revenue. The message was clear—Costa del Sol had to improve its urban infrastructure and better plan its development to successfully compete for tourists and revenue with its rivals.

The rapid development of tourism in Costa del Sol also had negative aspects. Urban chaos was one of them. Because of the speculative prices of land and the high cost of installing utilities, tourist establishments were jammed into just a couple of areas, while large portions of the coast remained vacant.⁹⁹ Furthermore, tourist developers who managed to buy a piece of land would use every acre to build a hotel but left little room for green spaces and rarely followed any aesthetic criteria in designing the available space.¹⁰⁰ This led to crammed urban clusters that did not fit with Andalusia’s traditional architectural style, which was one element of attraction in tourist advertising. To the cultural, aesthetic, and environmental problems were added legal ones. Most of the time, these hotels lacked proper building permits, failed to follow the mandated building plans, or added extra stores at the expense of aesthetics and urban functionality.¹⁰¹ As the 1966 plan made clear, the continuous lack of oversight and enforcement by local authorities was to blame for this situation. Moreover, these problems occurred in spite of the myriad plans put together to reform the area. “Costa del Sol is, without doubt, one of the Spanish provinces for which the largest number of studies was put together by various departments. Sadly, none of these projects have ever been put into practice.”¹⁰²

In response to this chaotic development, in 1963, Costa del Sol became the first tourist region in Spain to be declared an “area of tourist interest,” a designation that brought with it a number of potential benefits. But no significant improvements appeared. The region remained underdeveloped; in comparison with Costa Brava and the Balearic Islands, the two main tourist regions in Spain, it was the least developed area. Only in 1958 was the Málaga airport, originally built in 1919, modernized to allow large aircraft to land, and only in the mid-1960s could the region be reached by plane in a decent amount of time.

Another problem in the region was a high rate of illiteracy and the lack of an established population of tourist workers. Most tourist employees worked only during the summer and returned to rural areas in the winter. This made it difficult for hotels and restaurants to retain and train these workers.¹⁰³ After listing these shortcomings, the 1966 plan proposed some generic solutions:

1. The region should be exploited according to its natural resources.
2. The most suitable plan of development should be identified and put into practice.
3. This should follow the other development models at national and even international levels and closely observe tourist predictions.
4. An organic structuring of current planning should take place at the national level
5. A stronger involvement of the state with regard to building and improving road and railway infrastructure in order to meet the tourists’ needs
6. A complete study and implementation of public services are needed to enhance the region’s living standards, which is essential for the development of tourism
7. The coordination, orientation, and control of private constructions to avoid illegal or precarious constructions as well as frauds and outrageous prices
8. The adoption of necessary measures in order to accomplish the protection of landscapes, forests, beaches, monuments, and places of public interest
9. To increase the size of the tourist population
10. To establish as soon as possible the necessary regulations in order to prevent the amorphous development of urban centers¹⁰⁴

The plan clearly acknowledged the state’s failure in Costa del Sol and recommended a new policy orientation, especially greater oversight and regulation. The emerging tourist boom was clearly taking place in the absence of the state, which only fueled chaotic development. Local authorities often showed considerable leniency toward tourism developers, some of whom were prominent people in the community and part of the intertwined network of political and business elites.

Finally, in the late 1960s, central authorities began to make their presence felt. They established a special department to deal with “inspections and reclamations” within the Ministry of Information and Tourism. This became necessary as some tourists directed their complaints to the Ministry of Information and Tourism. A tourist from Great Britain explained that after paying eight pounds per day (the equivalent of 1,336 pesetas) for a top-floor luxury apartment in Málaga, he did not receive the expected services (like full maid service) and he had to deal with several water failures during his stay, which he found unacceptable for Costa del Sol.¹⁰⁵ The ministry sent a prompt reply to this tourist signed by Rodriguez Acosta, the head of the Sub-Secretariate of Tourism, in which he promised a thorough investigation of the tourist complex.

Tourist developers did not necessarily approve of the state’s more coercive attitude, and at times strongly criticized the ministry. As late as November 1972, a public letter written to the minister of information and tourism exemplified some people’s displeasure with the state’s role: “I have to ask you, Mr. Minister, not to worry about the success or failure of the tourist industry in general, and hotel business in particular. Neither Mr. Arias Salgado, or Mr. Fraga Iribarne, or Sanchez Bella had anything to do with the ‘tourist boom.’ Together with their teams, they have been witnesses to and bystanders of an explosion [in tourism] and have done nothing to encourage or support this process throughout the years.”¹⁰⁶ Many local developers did not welcome the implications of central control, which they believed would halt tourism.

Yet, at times, the owners of smaller tourist establishments or villas on the Costa del Sol showed discontent with the region’s development and asked for the central authorities’ backing. This was the case of Ilse Lang de Threlfall, a Swedish woman who owned a house in Málaga and who complained in 1970 about the plan of a real estate enterprise, Málaga Sol S.A., to build a large hotel in Estepona, a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Málaga that, she said, “is incompatible with the rules of urban planning.”¹⁰⁷ It is not clear what support de Threlfall, who was already a resident in Spain, received from the Sub-Secretariate of Tourism as no answer was provided. In another case, this time from 1969, a medical doctor who bought an apartment in Málaga, Roy Salkeld, objected to the raising of a building too close to the flat he lived in, which obstructed his view of the sea. He was also angry about the lack of green spaces and the sanitary conditions around his building block, which became such a nuisance that “my wife and I feel ashamed to invite guests over because of the surroundings of our apartment building.”¹⁰⁸ The letter, addressed to the minister of information and tourism, was answered by a high official in the ministry who assured Salkeld that the competent local authority would shortly start an investigation.¹⁰⁹

One possible reason the Ministry of Information and Tourism treated the two cases differently is that the Spanish state was putting considerable effort into selling apartments in the new residential complexes to foreigners as they were a source of hard currencies. But bad publicity undermined this effort. The ministry could not, however, always directly crack down on these tourist developers and their practices on its own. It needed the support of local authorities in Málaga and Costa del Sol. In 1970, Esteban Monserrat, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Information and Tourism, solicited the town hall in Málaga to stop issuing building permits for buildings that were too close to the beach in Torre del Mar in order to avoid “the urban disorder and errors that were made in other beach zones.”¹¹⁰

Costa del Sol and the Romanian Black Sea Coast emerged as beach destinations in the mid-to-late 1950s and early 1960s, respectively. Although both regions developed in response to Western tourists’ high demand for beach destinations, they followed two different development models. While tourist development on the Black Sea Coast resulted from the careful plans of the ONT–Carpathians and the Central Committee of the PCR, Costa del Sol grew unplanned until, in the late 1960s, the Spanish state began to assert some control over its development. In Spain, privately owned hotel corporations, which took over the majority of local businesses in the late 1950s and the 1960s, were the ones whose construction projects served as magnets for international tourism. For better or worse, these private corporations controlled the way in which the tourist landscape took shape on the Costa del Sol. The differences between the two regions’ planning and development could not be more evident. Moreover, shaping an infrastructure to attract and house tourists was very different from the impact that international tourists had on these regions.

Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Informalities

For both the Costa del Sol and the Black Sea Coast, tourist guidebooks published or supported by the two states argued that they offered foreign tourists an alluring blend of tradition and modernity. Ideally, foreign tourists should enjoy the regions’ and countries’ ethnic or religious culture. At the same time, guidebooks and tourist magazines offered plenty of information about sports activities, dance clubs, and gambling that did not seem fit with the official ideology of the two regimes. Despite what Spanish and Romanian officials hoped, foreign tourists had their own ideas of how to enjoy their vacations, ideas that often challenged aspects of local mores and ways of life in ways the two authoritarian regimes had not anticipated. In neither case was the influx of foreign tourists a wholesale assault on local practices and attitudes, but their impact was often notable.

In 1976, Vacances en Roumanie, a Romanian tourist magazine published abroad, enticed Western tourists to spend their holidays on the Romanian “Riviera” of the Black Sea. “Roulette, jazz, beauty contests, night shows, music, projections, and cocktails” were all part of the vacation package that was supposed to energize Western tourists for the rest of the year.¹¹¹ Indeed, according to a tourist flyer advertising Neptun, foreign tourists had various alternatives for spending their extra time. They could choose to take a trip abroad to Istanbul, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, or Kyiv; experience wine tasting and horse riding; or visit the Roman ruins and the Danube Delta. If they just wanted to spend a “pleasant evening,” they could eat in a “typical Romanian restaurant,” or a “restaurant with bands and dance floors,” or go to a nightclub or a disco.¹¹² Tourists could also go to spas or cruise the newly built Danube–Black Sea Canal, “a great achievement of Romanian builders.”¹¹³ Romanian tourist advertisements shaped their message according to the audience: while young tourists were invited to visit Costinești, “the resort of youth,” retirees were advised to come for treatment in either the fall or spring, when “specialized physicians closely follow up the prescribed cure or treatment, and tariffs are lower than in full season.”¹¹⁴

The vacation packages that the ONT–Littoral sold to foreign tourists were supposed to purposefully shape the tourists’ schedules. For example, regardless of tourists’ musical preferences, these packages included a Romanian folk evening. Doru B., a former bellboy at Doina Hotel, recalls, “It was mandatory … when they were handed the voucher, they were also getting a ticket to a Romanian evening, at Calul Bălan, or Internațional, or Rustic.”¹¹⁵ These restaurants offered Romanian or international fine dining along with traditional Romanian fiddle music concerts. However, this was not always to the taste of foreign tourists, who wanted to listen to jazz or rock music. Béla Kamocsa, a blues musician from Timișoara and one of the founding members of the then well-known Romanian band Phoenix in the 1960s, recalls that “At that time, many foreigners were hanging out on the Romanian seaside. After getting bored of what Romania could offer in terms of folk music, they were showing up at our concerts.”¹¹⁶ Interestingly enough, Kamocsa and his band held their concerts not in state-owned establishments but in a bar run by a commissioner (private entrepreneurs who leased state-owned facilities), a system that was common in the late 1960s and early 1970s, until the socialist state abolished it. As Kamocsa explains,

On our first year on the seaside, we played in a bar owned by a commissioner (some private commercial initiative soon to be ended). During the more open 1960s, restaurants and bars had some flexibility in hiring and paying musicians without offering too many explanations to the state. So we played in Eforie Nord at [the bar of] this commissioner, who paid us quite well. Otherwise, getting a contract on the seaside was quite tricky as you had to be connected to the Bucharest musical mafia network.¹¹⁷

Despite this hassle, Kamocsa described the atmosphere on the seaside as “more relaxed” as censorship was mild. He and his bandmates befriended many foreign tourists who listened to their music and told them they sounded like Western bands; one Italian tourist even invited them to play in Italy. Unfortunately for them, they did not get the necessary approvals to travel abroad for this concert.¹¹⁸ Kamocsa’s memoirs describe the tension between the inchoate liberalization of the 1960s and the state’s attempts to control interactions between Romanians and foreigners.

Doru B. confirmed this tension. According to him, foreign tourists seemed to enjoy their vacations in socialist Romania, as “they were all dancing and singing,”¹¹⁹ but the atmosphere was not completely relaxed. Clear separations between Western tourists and tourists from socialist countries marked the hotels’ landscape. Marioara V., a Romanian tourist, described the restaurants of various hotels in Mamaia as being split between tourists contingent on their nationality: “They were making a difference. Both at Jupiter, where Mr. Dima was, and at Doina, where my uncle was working—he was only given Swedish and British tourists because he knew English—there were some mini-saloons separated by green fences [of plants] … and on one side British were seated, on the other Swedish or Russians. Romanians were seated in the center.”¹²⁰

Not only were tourists physically separated, but they also received a different treatment. Oftentimes tourists from socialist countries complained that “they were treated with less consideration than tourists from the West.”¹²¹ The most obvious difference regarded food. As tourists were offered a relatively fixed menu, they could easily observe over the green fences what others were eating. Marioara V. described this disparity as follows:

For example, they [foreigners] would get two [to] three choices for breakfast that included tea, milk, coffee, bacon with eggs, cheese or Swiss cheese, salami, etc. For Romanians or Easterners, it wasn’t like that. You would get either tea or milk, in case you were with children, we wouldn’t get coffee, and to eat we would only get a boiled egg and a piece of thick rosy sausage.… They would all get refreshments like Nectar and Pepsi and mineral water, while we would only get tap water. For us, everything was in smaller quantities and less diversified.¹²²

The differences in menus were disturbing to Romanians and tourists from other socialist countries, who only saw the socialist state’s lack of ability to fulfill the promise of a good life for all. Coffee, an imported product in short supply in Romanian shops, was not on the menu even in vacation resorts.¹²³ In addition, in popular culture, thick rosy sausages were a cheap replacement for salami, another product difficult to find in regular shops. At times, some Romanian tourists would get better treatment than officially prescribed because of “connections.” This was the case for Marioara V., whose uncle was a waiter in the hotel she stayed in and who would arrange for her to receive the same menu as the “Westerners.”¹²⁴ But such informal practices were not always at hand for tourists from socialist countries, though these cannot be fully excluded. Most tourists, however, be they Romanians or tourists from other socialist countries, could only pursue “official channels,” which did not always listen to their complaints.

In fairness, in 1974, an opinion survey about tourist services on the seaside was put together by the Institute for Research and Development in Tourism that included tourists from both capitalist and socialist countries as well as Romanian tourists. A total of 12,930 people responded to this survey (2,588 Romanians and 10,342 foreign tourists) and characterized the offered services on the seaside as very good (26.3 percent), good (34.8 percent), average (16.4 percent), and unsatisfactory/below average (6.7 percent), while 21.5 percent did not answer.¹²⁵ This was slightly better than the responses that tourists provided in a 1969 survey that only included Western tourists.¹²⁶ However, these two surveys were the only ones performed on the seaside during the communist period. After a good year in 1975, in 1976, the number of tourists from capitalist countries unexpectedly plummeted by 20 percent and the number of tourists from socialist countries decreased by 5 percent, which left authorities in Romania perplexed. As a level 7.5 earthquake hit Romania in 1977, the number of tourists further declined and only slowly recovered in 1978, although the numbers remained below those in 1975. In 1979 and 1980, international tourism peaked in Romania (although the recovery was fueled mainly by tourists from socialist countries), only to enter chronic regression as of 1981. As tourists from Eastern Europe and Romanian tourists became a majority on the seaside in the 1980s, tourist services declined sharply in the absence of finickier Western tourists.

Political surveillance, although veiled in the early 1970s, was quite obvious in the 1980s and was a common practice on the Romanian Black Sea Coast. The increased number of foreign tourists created the opportunity for a cosmopolitan way of life, which the Romanian socialist regime regarded with caution. Activities such as smuggling of foreign currencies, prostitution, and illicit commerce, which the socialist state deemed crimes, thrived. To these mounting “hassles,” the state responded with increased surveillance. In 1977, a Ministry of the Interior report noted that “54 officers from the Foreign Language School were included among the tourist guides, or used in order to solve various problems in the security work. In addition, two surveillance teams, eight officers from the operative technique unit, and 45 officers [specializing] in economic and financial crimes [all of them subordinated to the Securitate] went to the seaside to help with the surveillance work.”¹²⁷

This mobilization of forces did not deliver the expected results as unwanted and even criminal activities mounted. One Securitate report noted that “criminal activities” on the Romanian seaside had increased by 30 percent compared to the previous year. Thus, 2,000 people were charged with smuggling of goods or foreign currencies, and 12 kilograms of gold and $28,000 were confiscated. Within just a couple of months, the value of illegal transactions reached an impressive 2.6 million lei.¹²⁸ Moreover, the Securitate complained that tourist workers temporarily employed for the summer were not thoroughly checked, and hence “dubious elements suspected of smuggling and prone to various criminal acts” got hired by the Ministry of Tourism.¹²⁹ The report added that when the militia or the Securitate succeeded in checking the employees, these verifications were often cursory, and there was little concern from the local office in Constanța to comply with the requests of the Bucharest headquarters.¹³⁰ Little coordination within the Securitate as well as between the Securitate and the Ministry of Tourism was to blamed for the limited success of surveillance on the seaside.

This situation hardly discouraged the regime, which only intensified its surveillance work in the 1980s. Every summer season, a special plan for the surveillance of foreign tourists was put together. All connections between Romanians and Westerners that went beyond the professional realm were deemed “suspect.”¹³¹ Furthermore, a 1986 report by the Securitate and the Constanța Border Police announced that the amount of information obtained by using surveillance doubled compared to the previous year.¹³² Securitate agents went as far as searching tourists’ personal belongings and discovered “compromising” phone numbers in their notebooks. The cases the Securitate followed included tourists who carried more goods than allowed by Romanian law (presumably intending to sell them), possession of foreign currencies, or information about Romanian citizens who had informal connections with foreign tourists or employees of tourist agencies from abroad.¹³³

Despite the increased surveillance, informal relations of tourist workers and Romanian tourists with Western tourists persisted throughout the 1980s. Romanians and foreigners would mix on the beach or in the dance clubs. Doru B. recalls that, although the entrance fee to the discos was paid in dollars, the locals had free entrance simply because they knew the doorman. “Now, let me tell you this: the entrance fee was in dollars … it was three dollars for the top discos. But we were locals and young, and the doorman, many times a friend or a neighbor, was letting us in … for free.” Asked if he interacted with foreign tourists, Doru B. nodded his head and replied: “of course, I had a lady friend from Norway, you know they would be the ones to come and hit on you!”¹³⁴ His comment suggests two aspects of note. The first is that, despite efforts to separate foreign tourists and Romanians, relationships, sometimes intimate ones, developed between them. This anecdotal evidence suggests that these relationships were not uncommon. The other is Doru B.’s conception of the looser sexual mores of tourists, particularly women, from Western Europe. How common it was for female Western tourists to flirt with Romanians is not clear, but the more relaxed approach of some Western tourists to sexual relations became a trope among hotel workers—and no doubt their friends—and offered new ways for Romanians to think about sexual mores.

Besides social connections between Romanians and foreign tourists, youth solidarities also developed. The Romanian seaside was part of an extended network of hitchhikers that included youngsters from all of socialist Eastern Europe. This worked as an escape even in the more economically challenging 1980s. Jan M., a truck driver from the GDR, recalled that as an East German, he could easily travel to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, but not to the more liberal Yugoslavia, in the 1980s. To spend a couple of days on the seaside, he would hitchhike across these countries each summer and live for a couple of weeks in either Costinești in Romania or Melnik in Bulgaria. These two places were among several meeting points for hitchhikers from socialist Europe who wanted to spend a couple of days on the Black Sea Coast, the only place suitable for sunbathing in socialist Eastern Europe, except for the Yugoslavian Adriatic Sea. “Everyone in our group knew the place. There was a similar village in Bulgaria, Melnik; one year we would go to Melnik and one year to the place in Romania [Costinești].”¹³⁵

The hitchhikers’ camp in Costinești was not officially on the map. In fact, Jan M. believes it was illegal because the militia would only let them camp there at night; during the day, they had to take their belongings and leave.¹³⁶ The photos depicting Jan M. with his friends show them on a terrace in Costinești, a village 15 km south of Constanța that communist officials called the “resort of youth.” It was the location for several official student holiday camps where Romanians in their twenties and thirties would spend their vacations.¹³⁷ The hitchhikers lived in a commune type of settlement, playing music, swimming, owning very few belongings, and rarely taking showers. “The sea was close, so we didn’t need one,” said Jan M. with a grin on his face.¹³⁸ As the hitchhikers would meet there every year, their group worked as a network that exchanged music, ideas, and a way of life among young people from socialist Eastern Europe and beyond. Communist authorities, hardly thrilled by the presence of these tourists, who did not bring money into the official economy and acted like “Western punks,” tolerated them as long as they did not openly challenge official power. “The Militia used to raid our camp, but they weren’t taking any action against us as long as we followed some rules [i.e., not making a fire],” explained Jan M.¹³⁹

With such daily personal interactions, the Romanian Black Sea Coast incrementally became a more cosmopolitan place where Romanians and tourists from other socialist countries interacted with Western tourists despite the communist regime’s attempts to keep such liaisons under control. Economic exchanges, personal relationships, and intimate relationships all left their mark on more than people’s memories. It is impossible to quantify the impact, just as it is impossible to ignore it. But at least along the Black Sea Coast, there came into being a world between the prosperous developed economies of the West and those of the socialist East. Over time, the state was moved from a relatively liberal regime in the 1960s and 1970s to a more controlling one in the 1980s, when state surveillance reached its peak. As a result, relationships became more strictly monitored, and foreign tourists found other locales for their vacations.

One of them was Costa del Sol. The arrival of foreign tourists at Costa del Sol also significantly changed people’s mentalities and way of life. Yet, unlike the communist regime in Romania, the Francoist regime did little to overtly discourage interactions between foreign tourists and Spaniards. Instead, it tried to channel tourists into activities that involved more “proper” behavior and dress, so as to meet the moral requirements of the conservative regime. In fact, the slogan “Spain is different,” which Spanish promoters used in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed at attracting tourists with folk art and tradition rather than the avatars of modern civilization. Folk dances and music were part of the promotion program of Spanish tourism. A tourist guide from 1960 pointed out that “In Andalusia, the act of singing and dancing is second nature; it is as imperative as life itself.”¹⁴⁰

The presentation of Spain as an exotic destination was alive and well throughout the 1970s. A 1970 tourist guidebook on Costa del Sol published in English attempted to draw tourists by presenting the region as a bucolic place where one could escape civilization. “A ramble along the beach is more than mere relaxation. It is a window onto a world of fantasy that lends itself to contemplation, a joyful escape from weariness.”¹⁴¹

From the point of view of Spanish tourist authorities, foreign tourists should adjust to local customs. A map from the end of the 1960s placed religious services first on the list, while places such as supermarkets and information offices were at the bottom of the list.¹⁴² Officials expected tourists to wear appropriate outfits when visiting the beach or towns. These boundaries applied to women more than men. In 1958, the Episcopal Commission of Orthodoxy and Morality published a booklet entitled Normas de Decencia Cristiana (Christian Norms about Decency) that examined issues ranging from youth sexuality, which “was forbidden to be discussed in public and it fell under the parents’ responsibility to initiate this discussion when the age was appropriate” so as to avoid “ sick curiosities and dangerous ideas”¹⁴³ to “dress and body ornaments,” “dancing,” and “summer behavior.”¹⁴⁴ The Spanish Catholic Church expressly banned any form of nudity and asked that girls older than twelve follow the dress code for women,¹⁴⁵ which the booklet defined as “mandatory non-sinful” as it had to cover the body and hide cleavage and bare arms.¹⁴⁶ The issue of greatest concern to the Church was people’s behavior when at the beach swimming pools. “An exceptional danger to morality comes from public bathing in the sea, pools, rivers or ponds,”¹⁴⁷ as the booklet put it. In order to prevent this, it asked the Guardia Civil and responsible authorities to enforce regulations at the beach and to “offer regular briefings about these rules” to tourist operators, while any person who happened to see something “morally disturbing” should report it to the police.¹⁴⁸ The booklet further recommended avoiding mixed bathing in pools, either public or private, unless it was a pool for children under twelve, or even at the seaside, as this might lead to “sins and scandals.”¹⁴⁹

Although these terms might seem absurd to foreign tourists, some guidebooks and brochures published in foreign languages warned tourists about the peculiarities of vacationing in Spain. For example, a 1966 guidebook, Your Guide to the Costa del Sol, included the Spanish State Tourist Office in London’s advice that British female tourists avoid wearing a two-piece bathing suit when going to the beach and instructed all tourists not to wear shorts while walking in towns.

Although in some popular Mediterranean seaside resorts, a two-piece bathing suit is not strictly prohibited, ladies are, nevertheless, requested to wear a one-piece bathing suit. Slacks, jeans, shorts, etc. may be worn in seaside villages.… Both ladies and gentlemen are requested not to wear shorts while visiting towns. Although strapless sundresses may be worn on the beaches, it is advisable to cover the shoulders with a jacket or stole in the towns. When visiting churches and other religious buildings, ladies should wear skirts and bear in mind that it is customary to have arms and heads covered.¹⁵⁰

Noticeably, the rules of bathing and strolling in seaside villages and towns became more relaxed than those presented in the 1958 booklet, but tourists were still asked to act cautiously. Still, the guidebook contains more restrictions for women than for men, as the Spanish state and Church attempted to contain their sexuality. The state and the Church regarded women’s exposed bodies as a threat to the established norms of a male-dominated society. Foreign tourists, who were guests in the country, were not expected to challenge this moral and sartorial order but to silently accept it. Carmello Pellejero Martinez, a historian of tourism on the Costa del Sol, appreciated the dilemma that the state and church faced: “In the 1960s, most of the tourists came from the middle class, with a different type of life, customs, and a certain influence over the morality of the people which the Spanish state did not anticipate.”¹⁵¹

It was not just that Spanish men might be at risk of seduction by the more progressive Northern European female tourists. Foreign habits might contaminate Spanish women as well. Well into the 1950s and, in some more remote regions, even in the 1960s, the Francoist regime cultivated the belief that foreign cultures were dangerous, and that Spaniards should conduct their lives around traditional customs and mores. To dampen the possible negative influence from foreigners, especially tourists, Spanish women received special education as part of their membership in The Feminine Institute, a Falange-controlled organization for women, coordinated by Franco’s wife. Membership was mandatory for all employed women.¹⁵² From the state’s point of view, the more financially independent these women were, the more vulnerable to cosmopolitan foreign influence they were. The Feminine Institute aimed to offer them “a political and religious education to shape them socially and to teach them to act as true Spanish women.”¹⁵³ But this attempt proved rather unsuccessful. Sergio P., a hotel owner in his hometown of Ronda, a town 50 km from the coast, noted that women and young people were the first to embrace the transformation: “I mostly recall changes in the way of dressing, women picking up smoking … overall different habits that changed the Spanish society.”¹⁵⁴ Sergio remembered living through this change as a student at the University of Málaga in the 1960s:

Because of the large number of foreign tourists in Málaga, a striking difference between the coast and the interior occurred. Different values, ways of life … this is what tourists brought from their countries while Spain was a closed, backward society because of the political regime. When the country opened in the 1960s and tourists arrived, it was a shock. This influence tremendously changed the local population and brought about different mentalities, behaviors, and especially a different view on sexuality. And then Málaga and the coastal region began to open very quickly. This became obvious to me when I was traveling back home to Ronda, where tourists were fewer.¹⁵⁵

The Francoist regime had few alternatives to this invasion of tourists, otherwise beneficial to its economy. Carmello Pellejero Martinez of the University of Málaga believes that the state had to choose between losing the tourists and accepting the money they brought and the potential moral harm they posed:

Many politicians feared the tourists and this change in mentalities. The choice, however, was between giving up the divisas [hard foreign currencies] and assuming the risks. It wasn’t easy, but the idea of accepting tourism and the tourists won out. Slowly—you realize that at the end of the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the Church would often [take a] position against the bikini, the long hair, and the customs that came from “outside”—the state’s resistance melted when the money showed up.¹⁵⁶

The Spanish state chose to try to contain the potential corrosive influence of foreign tourists and convey the appearance of freedom as long as tourists did not engage in political activities or openly express their criticism of the Francoist regime. However, it acted paternalistically in relation to Spanish citizens, who were told to refrain from imitating the foreigners and constantly reminded that this “invasion” was economically motivated. Despite the different political regime in Spain, this stance was similar to that of the communist regime in Romania, which used paternalism, patriotism, and the needs of the socialist state as weapons to justify its surveillance of ordinary citizens. To both countries’ leaders, the economic and political threats from the “decadent West” were real and required that the state protect its citizens.

Spatial Construction

The Romanian seacoast took advantage of the beach tourism boom to the same extent as the now more famous Costa del Sol in Spain. Because of the arrival of foreign tourists, the economic basis of both coastal regions shifted away from agriculture; glamorous tourist spaces dotted with modern constructions replaced former fishing villages. However, the different politics of the two regimes shaped this process and marked the tourist landscape of the two regions. In Romania, the state employed central planning to design hotels and subsequent commercial spaces; in Spain, private corporations, often informally connected to influential officials, initially played this role. Only later, after 1962, when various voices complained about how these early resorts shattered urban space, did Spanish officials at the local and central levels take more seriously their responsibility to provide adequate urban infrastructure and regulate the quality of construction.

The way that building took place influenced the configuration of leisure space on both coasts. The tendency was to build less expensive hotels that had more rooms, which became symbolic of the shift in the 1960s to mass tourism. Yet, in the Spanish case, nostalgia for the elite tourism of the 1930s lingered; the earliest large hotels welcomed mostly wealthy tourists as their cost made them prohibitive for ordinary travelers, who in the 1960s constituted a substantial majority of visitors. Thus, clear-cut economic and political divisions occurred among tourists in both coastal regions. On the Romanian Black Sea Coast, Western tourists occupied the best hotels and received better services on the grounds that they were charged more than Romanian and other tourists from socialist countries. To these economic separations were added political ones, as the socialist state did not want unfettered interactions between foreign tourists, especially Westerners, and Romanians. The economic differences on the Spanish Costa del Sol made it impossible for ordinary Spaniards to lodge in the same hotels or visit the same restaurants or discos that wealthier American and Northwestern European tourists frequented.¹⁵⁷ Although, Spanish authorities did not explicitly prohibit informal interactions between Spaniards and foreign tourists, it tried to limit the latter’s influence through educational and religious programs.¹⁵⁸

Nevertheless, as cultural studies research has shown, a given space is not an abstract notion but is instead constructed through interactions between multiple actors.¹⁵⁹ Hence, the configuration of tourist spaces in the two coastal areas cannot be regarded as a one-sided story. Despite the physical or cultural boundaries that the two regimes sought to impose by various methods, the Black Sea Coast in Romania and Costa del Sol in Spain displayed not simply a colorful landscape but also an emerging cosmopolitanism. Tourists gave specific meaning to these spaces. In their interactions with locals and fellow tourists, many of them pushed or ignored the boundaries set by the two regimes. Consciously or unconsciously, be it by the type of clothing they wore, their rather different sense of public morality, or their gifts to locals, foreign tourists’ behavior was often at odds with local customs or official discourse. In the end, the two tourist spaces exemplified a form of unspoken negotiation between the state on the one hand and tourists and tourist workers on the other.

Comparing the two regions allows one to appreciate how the politics of two different dictatorial regimes functioned at the grassroots level and how the Black Sea Coast and Costa del Sol emerged as cosmopolitan tourist spaces in spite of state efforts to assert political control. Moreover, it shows a map of postwar Europe where the beach areas of the Romanian seacoast and Costa del Sol became integrated into the larger European framework despite the ideological divisions between the capitalist West and the socialist East and the political and economic marginality of the two states. In this way, it encourages scholars of contemporary Europe to go beyond a monolithic view of postwar Europe as comprised of two blocs—socialist and capitalist—and observe the similarities between Southern and Eastern Europe in spite of their different political and economic systems.