What happened to make a small, sleepy town like Marbella and a fishing district like Torremolinos become branches of the great networks of chic tourism? How did the degeneration transform an old-time paradise into overcrowded territory, the paradigm of tackiness and bad taste?

This book tells the story of a dream that became a nightmare. For this, out march the precursors. Ricardo Soriano and his nephew Alfonso de Hohenlohe, the illustrious visitors from the beginning, like Jean Cocteau or Edgar Neville, the splendour of an era in which the Costa del Sol erected itself into a meeting point to which personalities from around the world flocked, seduced by the invitation to live a permanent party.

With his peculiar sense of humour, Juan Bonilla describes every facet: the origins, the literary and cinematographic recreations, the routes of leisure, the elegant evenings and the wild parties… To sum it up, the decadence of the area that began as an exquisite summer retreat, went on to become an oasis of freedom in the Spain of developmentalism, and ended up dying by success, destroyed by property speculation.