Giles Brown
CONGRATULATIONS! You survived another summer season on the Coast.
While it seemed to be a little less frenzied and frantic than previous summers, there was still plenty of mayhem in Marbella.
Much had been made of Marbella mayor Angeles Muñoz’s decision to get tough on topless tourists with a series of measures introduced to combat people wandering around town with their shirts off – both male and female – as well as those carrying large blow up dolls, penises and the like. Regular readers might remember that I proposed the formation of a specialist, highly trained police squad to combat this problem – the Marbella Oversized Inflatable Sex Toy force – or M.O.I.S.T for short.
Alas, M.O.I.S.T never came into being mainly due to a decrease in the number of British tourists ‘of that type’ visiting, perhaps due to the fact that the UK enjoyed a long, hot summer and also the fact that the dreaded The Only Way is Essex TV series decided not to film in ‘Marbs’ this year and so the fans who normally flock to be close to their idols stayed away.
That wasn’t to say that Marbella wasn’t eventful, however, as anyone who had the pleasure of driving on the coast in August – and didn’t get stuck in the horrendous traffic caused by Spain’s biggest cycle race, the Vuelta de España, blocking the roads for two days in high season – will testify.
If you were blasted aside by a high-powered supercar sporting German or Dutch plates and seemingly trying to set a new world record for the Marbella-Tangiers run – you were not alone. My inside source tells me that a ‘bespoke’ car rental firm set up this year and specialised in clients from the Maghreb. There was a definite increase in high spending, hard partying Moroccans in town this summer, most of them looking like they were extras in a French Montana video.
And as befitting ‘les noveaux kids sur le bloc’, there was even a little ‘petit gangsta’ activity, with burned out luxury cars in Banus and an arson attack on a clandestine brothel. In both cases the perpetrators were gone and presumably back in Morocco before you could say ‘what time is the next fast ferry out of Algeciras, mon brave?’
Ahhh Marbella. Where the faces and races may change, but the conversation and crime doesn’t. I love this town…
