Loutish tourist behaviour is like an infection Marbella has to treat each summer

Giles Brown on the fallout from the Banus champagne spray party that saw revelers run down by a 4×4 and the subsequent police chase

IN a press conference, Marbella mayor Jose Bernal praised the town’s emergency services and claimed the incident demonstrated that ‘Marbella is a safe town’.

Mayor Bernal praised the ‘rapid and efficient response’ that saw 40 police and two fire engines attend the scene of the accident.

As Briton Marcus Stewart was due to appear in court, the mayor said that it was ‘only a small percentage that is difficult to control’.

This didn’t impress everyone however.

“Aliens could be abducting concejales and probing them up the butt and the Mayor would still say everything’s ok,” remarked a weary Marbella surfer friend.

In the meantime the Town Hall decided it would get tough and issued a decree that public drunkenness, anti social behavior and not wearing a top would be punishable by fines.

Sadly my application to be the arresting officer if any young blonde Scandinavian tourists intend to go topless was turned down.

Others turned to Social Media to voice their displeasure. Some even went as far as to sign a petition to ban ‘low class tourism’ from Marbella. Although I did stop to pause and wonder how they were going to enforce this.

Perhaps an urbane, Noel Cowardesque figure could be stationed, wearing a smoking jacket on a chaise longue under the Marbella arch, pale sherry in one hand, copy of Debretts in the other, to make sure those wishing to enjoy their two weeks of sunshine weren’t just too beastly for words?

Having said all that, a video of Spanish hooligans (Spoligans?) bashing seven bells out of each other outside the Wall Street nightclub, also went viral last week and proved that lack of brain cells isn’t purely a British problem.

It was a subject that I touched on when I was interviewed by a German TV crew, wanting to know what it was like being an expat on the Costa del Sol, post Brexit. (Although it has to be admitted that if I am the average British expat then we are all in deep trouble).

The German TV crew followed me around for the day, and kept remarking how beautiful Marbella was, with its Old Town, paseos, beaches and not at all how it had been reported in the media – full of tattooed bad boys, pneumatic bimbos, flash cars and all the rest.

I explained it thus: “The thing is this. When you have a contagious disease, you quarantine the area off so that it can run its course and won’t spread any further.

“And that’s what we’ve done here. We’ve had a severe outbreak of Narcissistic Bling Wannabeism accompanied by the usual idiotic behavior, and we’ve decided to quarantine Puerto Banus.

“The virus is expected to burn itself out by September 1 when they all go home and we can get on with life as normal.”