A tour of Spain’s haunting and historical buildings

They call it the Manhattan on the Mediterranean. A forest of skyscrapers reaches up towards the clouds. Benidorm is a high-rise anachronism by the sea, a triumph of fantasies over reality. Half a century ago, the soaring slab hotels of the former fishing village were the outward symbol of a country on the up. The philosophy wasn’t so different from Dubai’s later grand plan. Although, unlike in the Gulf, the architecture was all done on the cheap.. Tourism helped to propel Spain to become an economic powerhouse. But today that dream has turned sour. The Edificio Intempo in Benidrom is the shining symbol of the end of a dream – and the start of a nightmare. It is a building so ugly, so menacing, so otherworldly that it defies reason. It’s a building children will be terrified by. It looks like a bipod that has landed from Mars on a mission to destroy humanity. It has certainly destroyed many of its creditors. Spain’s tallest residential building is a disaster. Overbudget, late – it’s still not finished. And to cap it all, according to a report in El Pais, they forgot to build lift shafts all the way up to the top – though the developer’s PR angrily went wild on Twitter to refute that claim.. The Edificio Intempo was, like many of Spain’s contemporary buildings, designed to ‘kick-start’ growth – just like Benidorm’s 1960s skyscrapers did. Except none of these new buildings kick-started growth post-2000. They plunged the country into a mire of its own making.. Spain is bankrupt not because of the 2008 global financial crisis, but because of its grandiose construction projects that have gone awry. Yet, these monuments to madness, greed and blind faith are some of the most weird and fascinating sights in Europe right now. Not many tourists come to gawp at them – but they should. These buildings teach the same kind of lessons that history museums and art galleries do. With a taste for something abnormal, I hire a car and decide to go on a road trip with a difference – rather than looking at great triumphs from the guidebooks, I’ll be looking at great monumental tragedies in the real world. My journey will take me up Spain’s east coast. Benidorm is my starting point: the town itself has shed its toxic reputation for loutish behaviour. Its seafront has been rebuilt, crowned with a sinuous promenade that sweeps up and down like a wave. Its beach is clean and child-friendly, its town centre is tacky but welcoming. It’s not as bad as I feared. Yet, those huge tower blocks are oppressive. And the 47-storey Edificio Intempo is the most sinister of the lot. Its oddness fuelled critics to speculate that the ‘11’ and ‘M’ many claim you can see on the front of the building is a macabre memorial to the terrorist attack carried out in Madrid on March 11, 2004 – where 191 people were killed when a bomb exploded on a train in the capital. If true, it’s a reminder many resent. Costly white elephants Today Spain’s economy is in meltdown and many Spaniards blame the city, regional and national governments for spending too much on white elephant projects. Up the AP-7 motorway in Spain’s third city, Valencia, Euros have been burned through left, right and centre. The Valencia street-racing circuit hosted prestigious Formula 1 races, the last of which was last summer. The circuit twists and turns around the port and allows spectators to get up close and personal with the action as never before. Yet today, the circuit is barren and empty. There was a plan on the table to share the Spanish Grand Prix on alternating years with Barcelona, but at the moment it looks like Valencia’s street circuit will never see another F1 race. Spanish newspaper Marca reported earlier this year that thieves have stolen anything of worth and that the pit buildings and access tunnels are being left to fall apart. Nearby is the City of Arts And Sciences. When I visit, it is empty. Wind whips in across the eerie, flat, former bed of the Turia river, which was re-routed in the 1950s. This is where architect Santiago Calatrava was allowed to indulge his every whim. And it possibly teaches us that no single architect and no single city planner should be allowed to have everything they want, all at once. If you eat too much at the buffet, you feel sick. To look at the City of Arts And Sciences is like a space station – super-modern on one level, and yet the excess of sand-blasted concrete harks back to an earlier, post-War age. The shapes of the huge buildings evoke horrifying giant insects – like the Edificio Intempo this is architecture that’s probably not suitable for kids of a sensitive disposition. The complex comprises a science museum, greenhouse, aquarium, opera house and Imax cinema – though what’s inside is not really the point. The point, for Calatrava, was to construct a world. A world of his own. Its size and scope certainly impresses. But the rationale behind it? Not so clever. Its construction costs have left city and region alike in dire financial straits. There’s a regular tour run by the city’s ‘indignados’ – the upset protesters – which takes in Valencia’s white elephants, with the City of Arts and Sciences as the coup de grãce; the finale of fiscal folly. Ask a local what they think of this place and the chances are they’ll be so furious they’ll risk choking on their paella. I press on north, through low hills, over green and orange fields. The CV-10 Motorway is the Comunitat Valenciana’s most pointless motorway. Traffic is suspiciously light. It was supposed to carry thousands of cars and their passengers to a new airport: but it’s a ghost airport. Castellon Airport is so poorly constructed it can’t even be landed on. It was built at the behest of disgraced former local political leader Carlos Fabra as an attempt to go down in history for creating something – something no-one needed because both Valencia and Reus Airports are incredibly close by. It cost €150 million and today is an eerie place. I stare at the empty terminal, the abandoned car parks, the shiny new silver buildings with no tenants, not even any obvious security guards on watch. The runways have large ‘X’s painted at either end to remind wayward 737s full of English or German holidaymakers not to land here. At the roundabout by the entrance to the airport, a huge abstract sculpture presides. It’s a sort of man with a plane on his head but he looks tortured, or mad perhaps, like a character from Picasso’s Guernica rendered in three dimensions, which I’m happy to see vanishing in my rearview mirror as I drive away. Dreams bulldozed Along the entire coast of the Levante between Benidorm and Tarragona there are villages of whitewashed houses, freshly built, their values having sunk to almost nothing. Foreign second home buyers have seen nest eggs dwindle, sometimes planning permission wasn’t formally gained and villas have been bulldozed by the authorities. I drive on to Terrassa, in the hills above Barcelona. It’s a bit out of the way but it’s worth it to see one of the most impressive golf course hotels in the world. Because it’s been folded into Hilton’s Doubletree brand, the La Mola Hotel is somewhat understated – you don’t read much about it and few people go there. I take a walk around the complex, looking at the pool, the golf course, the conference rooms. There are scarcely any guests playing golf, no-one in the pool, and the conference rooms are begging for a corporate presentation. For the first time on the trip I feel it’s a real shame, as this building is genuinely glorious. It’s low rise, boasts lashings of warm wood, muted colours and wide expanses of glass. From my room – one of the most comfortable I’ve stayed in for months – I survey the horizon. I can see Sir Norman Foster’s Torre de Collserola TV Tower poking up over the top of Mount Tibidabo in Barcelona. And that’s where I head next. We all know tourist Barcelona – The Ramblas, the mesmerising Barri Gotic and the Plaça Catalunya where George Orwell cowered between bullets, bravely writing brave prose about brave men and women who were fighting during the 1936 Revolution that turned into Spain’s bloody civil war. Latterly, Barca’s indignados have gathered here and squatters occupied buildings last time I visited, though they seem to have either left or been forced out. Nearly a quarter of Spain’s young are without work and you feel for them. You can’t just come to Spain for a holiday any more without reconciling the fact that it can often be pretty miserable for the locals. Beyond this tourist Barcelona a flurry of developments sprouted up when times were good. You can find them in the eastern, former industrial, parts of the city. Now, many of these projects lie half-finished or deserted. From my luxurious suite at the top of the Melia Sky Hotel on Avenida Diagonal I get a breathtaking view of the city. But right in front of the window – a half-finished skyscraper. The walls are there but nothing else. No builders come to work on it, nothing seems planned for it at all. A crane sways in the wind – lost and without much hope. I remember back to the opening bash of this hotel in October 2008. Back then Spain was perched on a sort of a precipice, but no-one seemed to care. Turn left out of the hotel and you get to the new Torre Agbar, the headquarters of Barcelona’s water company. It’s a thrilling – and expensive – building. It’s well used and well loved. Yet its size and its cost seem out of place. Turn right out of the hotel and you get to the Parc del Forum – a wasteland of concrete built for the sailing events in the 1992 Olympics. It’s like a humongous skate park, with sloped pavilions, steep steps and huge pavements. It’s deserted except for one weekend a year in May when it comes alive with the Primavera Sound music festival. All of this is nothing new It’s important to see all this in context, to see these ghost projects as part of a wider Spanish history. Property speculation, duff judgment and building for the ego rather than for any specific need is nothing new. Barcelona’s most famous architect was guilty of it all a century ago. Park Guell looks as stunning as ever but it’s actually an unfinished ghost project, too. A hundred years ago, Antoni Gaudi thought he was building a housing development. But – like so many housing developments in today’s Spain – it never worked out that way. The houses didn’t get built and the Park today is just one of the most beautiful pieces of landscape art on earth. With its mosaics, its stunning entrance lodge and its lizard fountain, it’s like a fairytale. The view from the winding bench at the peak of the park, down towards the sea never fails to amaze me. It is one of the most perfect urban frames you could wish for. And what’s that in the distance? Another unfinished building at Barcelona’s heart. The Sagrada Familia, that huge cathedral, is perhaps the greatest of Spain’s cock-eyed super building projects because it’s the one that might never be finished at all. A century in the making, it could easily be a century more before it even nears completion. Perhaps as a tribute to the Spanish buildings that either never worked, never got used, never got finished, or never became loved, should work on the Sagrada Familia just stop altogether? That way it becomes a monument to the weird way that Spaniards – whether for money, grandeur or just through not thinking things through – always seem to end up with half-finished or half-deserted monuments. They may be strange but these odd buildings stop you in your tracks and make you think.