The Waning Summer Season

ALM Puerta del Mar 70sWe are now a almost week into the atrophied summer of late, which is the 15th of July to the 15th of August. Before the Costa Tropical was packed from San Juan in late June until the last day of August with every weekday in between being indistinguisable from a weekend.

Right now, all businesses are trying desperately to make enough money in those short 30 days to pad out the long off-season period.

If there is one huge difference between the summers of the mid 70s, 80’s and early 90s it is the sad fact that nowadays, there are far fewer people during the week than on weekends.

This is for two reasons: the autovía to Granada, meaning that people can travel down from, and back up to, Granada each day without having to fork out for accommodation and secondly, despite higher salaries, we are a lot worse off.

Yes, before a tradesman could take a month off in the summer on the Costa Tropical and live like a king. Even during the rest of the year, on only a single-income economy, the whole family could eat out at least once a week, take out a 12-year mortgage for the family home and then after take out another one for a holiday home on Costa Tropical.

Yet today, surrounded by a myriad of consumer gadgets, young people have become imprisoned by 40-year mortgages with both adults working full time; one salary for the mortgage and the other to pay the rest of the bills and put food into the fridge.

All this was before the Dictatorship of the Politically Correct; in 1984 two humorists (Tip y Col) could make a joke on national TV about the assassination in 1974  of who was lined up to become Franco’s successor, Admirante Carrero Blanco, yet Cassandra Vera, a 21-year-old History student in 2017 was sentenced to a 12-month suspended sentence for posting several jokes on Twitter about the assassination of the same man.

What is the answer to the dwindling high season? How can the Costa Tropical make the second fortnight of June and the month of September into an extended high season? Do we promote weekend tourism during an extended period of the year? If Sol, Playa y Pipas as the backbone of Costa Tropical Tourism is dying, what do we replace it with?

Do you have any ideas?

(News/Editorial: The Atrophied Summer)

  1 comment for “The Waning Summer Season

  1. Malcolm Berry
    July 21, 2020 at 6:12 pm

    For seniors, the summer is too hot and crowded. Those seniors who live in N. Europe or Canada, like us, would enjoy the warm, not hot, months of September to April. Perhaps directing advertising towards this group would be beneficial.

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