Benidorm is a holiday haven for sun-worshipping Brits looking for a slice of the Costa Blanca on a budget.
Around 800,000 tourists from Blighty head to the high-rise Spanish coastal town every year, and when Express.co.uk visited in August the place was mobbed with Brits from all over the country.
Every evening while our reporter was in Benidorm, ‘English Square’ – the name given to a collection of streets inland from Levante Beach – was chock full of boozed up tourists enjoying a night on the tiles.
Holidaymakers filled the bars to listen to musicians perform show-stopping classics across a variety of genres.
One such performer, who routinely wowed audiences with his renditions of rock classics, was Jonny Elraiz, better known as Jonny Hellraizer of the band White Coast Rebels.
He told this website that Benidorm “had something for everyone”, and while that appeared generous given the town’s very specific cultural offering, it was clear that tourists really did love the place.
However, as we later learned, Benidorm – referred to by Jonny as “Blackpool in the sun” – isn’t just neon lights, loud tunes and late opening hours; the seaside sun spot has a much darker side.
Poverty isn’t hard to find. Homeless residents wander the streets, crumbling properties sit in the shade beneath sky-scraping hotels.
When Jonny isn’t rocking out on the strip, he runs a homelessness charity: City Streets Community Project (CSCP).
CSCP, set up four years ago, helps anyone on the streets or that has a home but needs assistance. It owes its continued existence to generous donations.
“Normally, what we do is we either cook or collect around 50-60 meals, and then I go round and we give them out and we spend a bit of time with the guys on the streets”, Jonny explained as he drove out to pick up food parcels.
“See what we can do to help them – give them clothes, and sleeping bags and tents and whatever.”
The father-of-four added: “If you can try and get people off the streets within the couple of weeks to a month, you’ve saved them.”
Incredibly, he revealed that many of those that the charity helps did not fall on hard times in Spain but were destitute in Britain.
He claimed Brits scraped together whatever they had for a cheap airfare and moved to Benidorm already below the poverty line.
“They think I’ll be able to get a cheap room or something. Some of them think oh well it’s hot enough anyway, you know what I mean?”, he explained.
“When you’re desperate and you’ve got no hope and you’re in a s*** situation – many of them are homeless already… or more of the sofa surfing type – it’s kind of like ‘what have you got to lose?’
“I don’t even think they think they’re going to be destitute, it’s a hope for them.”
Jonny, himself a former heroin addict that lived on the streets, said that in four years CSCP has come to the aid of “well over” 100 Brits.
But his services are used by Benidorm residents from “all over the world”.
Of the between three and four hundred people his team of four volunteers have assisted, 82 have “actually physically [been] helped get off the streets… back into what we’d call society”, he said.
How do residents contact Jonny and his volunteers?
“They’ve got my number. People let me know if there’s new people around on the streets or whatever. But I go round, you know what I mean?”, he explained.
The demand “comes in peaks and troughs, it really does. It’s very transitory.
“Literally, the food run could double in a day.”
