The inhabitants of the small houses posed at the Babilonia beach, in Guardamar del Segura, in the south of the Costa Blanca, had to build makeshift dikes in front of their doors to protect their housing from the rise in waters, caused by the construction of a pier further. In Alicante, a little further north, the Vistamar residential building is so close to the beach that, seen from afar, this 39 -story brick and concrete tower seems to bathe in the middle of the Mediterranean. On some windows, we can read “SOS”, because increasingly violent storms, under the effect of climate change, threaten the entire Albufereta district, built in the 1960s, at the start of tourist development in Spain.
In Valencia, the Formula 1 circuit, inaugurated in 2008 and supposed to bring international renown to the city, has become an extent of abandoned concrete, partially occupied by a slum where young idlers play small cars. As for the subdivision Ciudad Quesada, in Rojales, with its golf course with a bright green planted in the middle of a semi-desert panorama, it announces to foreign investors a “Spanish life for dirty” (“Spanish life for sale”), despite its ghost city looks.
For his series “The Idea of Exito” (“The idea of success”), the Spanish photographer and director Markel Redondo traveled the Valence region between 2020 and 2021, wondering about the meaning of these depressed landscapes, however perceived in their time as symbols of success and progress. “The Costa Blanca is perhaps the region which best embodies the will that exists in Spain to build always more, always higher, larger. It is an idea of poorly understood progress, which exploits natural resources as if they were endless and which has given rise to a lot of corruption and speculation ”, underlines the 47 -year -old Basque creator who had already discussed the relationship of man to the urbanized landscape in “Castillos de Arena” (“Sand castles”).
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Source: Lemonde