This charter holiday hotspot wants to become a European innovation hub

“We are really proud of the job we have done in the city,” says Antonio Pérez, mayor of Benidorm, from his office just a few hundred metres from the city’s famous Levante Beach.

Benidorm – home to around 75,000 locals – has been known as a tourist destination for a century. The explosion in European package holidays in the late 20th century benefitted Benidorm in particular, and visitor numbers have remained high. The town had 2.8 million visitors in 2024— an almost 3% increase from the previous year.

But along with this footfall, concerns for the protection of the town’s natural resources have been in the spotlight, with European media from The Telegraph to Spain's El Pais, highlighting the extent to which rowdy, littering tourists are damaging Benidorm's sandy coastline.

Now though, the European Commission has singled out Benidorm for a green award, in recognition of the the town's recent work to try and improve things.

Mayor Pérez runs Impact Loop through the laundry list of measures the town has put into place to preserve the beaches and sea, and make the tourism industry more sustainable. These range from programmes of introducing vegetation around Benidorm’s waterways to protect it from the flash flooding seen ever more frequently in the Valencia region, to systems to decarbonise the city’s energy system, to app-based software solutions to help the city’s hotels better plan for expected demand and make their resource use more efficient in response.

He says the town is also also keeping a close eye on the ‘blue economy’ – the health of the marine ecosystems around their famous beaches, suing various measuring and analytics.

“We’re trying to look to what will happen in the future, to take [measures] before,’ says Mayor Pérez. “We are trying to make projects that will think about looking after the green and blue that we have all around our city.”

A new European hub for innovation?

The Mayor says the European Commission green award is a great recognition of the work the town has done to date. He confirms the town is sticking to a road map to make it even more sustainable in future, with social, economic and environmental aspects to the strategy.

He also hopes the award will encourage more businesses to visit or set up shop in the town. It could even, perhaps, establish Benidorm as a new European hub for innovation, particularly for the kinds of impact businesses which would fit with his vision for a green future in Benidorm.

A sandbox for different pilot projects

“In all this period, we’ve been working with startups and enterprises on different projects. We see the city as a sandbox for different pilot projects," says Pérez. For us, the objective is for different enterprises to come to Benidorm, to create different businesses around tourism. That is our main goal.”

Sunny Spanish cities like Barcelona and Valencia have already become magnets for startups and digital nomads in recent years. Barcelona hosts over 1,700 startups, according to data from non-profit startup organisation Mind The Bridge. Valencia is home to more than 1500 startup businesses, with its ecosystem growing by 15 percent in 2024, according to Startup Valencia.