Theroux´s Dismal Take on the Spanish Coast

Reading a book on the plane by notorious grump Paul Theroux called ¨The Pillars of Hercules,¨where he travels from one end of Gibraltar to the other, the long way. After leaving the rock, he travels to Spain and has this to say.

¨The utterly blighted landscape of the Spanish coast–Europe´s vacationland, a vile straggling sandbox–begins about here, north of Marbella, and continues, with occasional breaks, all the way up the zigzag shore to France. The meretriciousness, the cheapo appeal, the rankness of this chain of grease-spots is so well-known it is superflous for me to describe it, and it is beyond satire. So why bother?

But several aspects of this reeking vulgarity interested me. The first was that the debased urbanization on this coast seemed entirely foreign, as though the whole holiday business had been foisted on Spain by outside investors hoping to cash in.
In full sunshine it might have had a cheap and cheerful carnival atmosphere, but under gray skies it hovered, a grotesque malignancy, sad and horrible, that was somewhere between tragedy and farce. And Spain seemed distant.¨