Benidorm, the Spanish seaside village which was to balloon from utter obscurity to become synonymous with summer package tourism, today has a resident population of more than 60,000 that swells in summertime to more than half a million. Many of those visitors return year after year to sample its staple pleasures, sun, sea, sex and sangria, without giving any other holiday destination so much as a thought.

Half a century ago it was a struggling Valencian fishing community, relying partly on the sardine shoals and on the earnings of its young men at sea in the mercantile marine. It had no running domestic water supply. Its drinking water was brought in on the back of a mule and doled out in carefully monitored measures in the plaza from a barrel. Primitive water wheels irrigated the fields. Human waste was carried out of its hovels and dumped in the sea or on the earth.

The astonishing transformation of this wretched environment to a high-rise hotel conurbation, towering over its stretch of the Costa Blanca, was the brainchild of its canny young mayor, Pedro Zaragoza, a man who was planning its future as a magnet of mass tourism in the early 1950s.

It was a time when the puritanical grip of Franco was a long way from being prised loose from Spanish life, and the liberating influence of northern European manners were anathema to the country’s church leaders.

Zaragoza always liked to claim that his dramatic introduction of the bikini to Benidorm was the engine of his success and the transformation of the Spanish holiday trade.

“Without asking anyone I signed a municipal order authorising the wearing of bikinis,” he liked to say. The result was a threat of excommunication by the archbishop. But a succès de scandale was already in the making, as the local populace was treated to the often comical sight of struggles between officers of the Civil Guard and the comely blonde female tourists, newly arrived from Valencia airport, whom they attempted to cover up and escort from the beaches.

When friends and colleagues on the municipal council and even some government ministers spoke out against him, Zaragoza decided to put his case as an instrument for the revitalisation of the Spanish economy to the Caudillo himself. Jumping on his motor scooter, he rode the nine hours to Madrid and presented himself to Franco at the Prado palace. Curious at this oil and dirt-stained apparition and the vision of Spain’s future he brought with him, Franco listened and promised to come to Benidorm to see for himself what was being achieved there.

For Benidorm the rest was history. The Church was quietly told to back off. Tourists could sport their bikinis, at first gingerly — and then enthusiastically — followed by local women. By the end of the 1970s, with the Caudillo only a handful of years in his grave, the apotheosis of toplessness had been achieved.

There was of course much more to it than that. A great organiser himself — whatever else — Franco would never have been taken in merely by a gospel of near-nudity. He recognised in Zaragoza’s vision the attributes of a town planner.

Five years before his scooter ride to Madrid, Zaragoza had been drawing boulevards, sidewalks, plazas, gardens and hotels on terrain stretching out from the centre of his village, where only almond and olive trees grew in the bare earth. The mayor organised a water supply, which was piped in from 15km away.

Recognising the huge importance of air travel to his whole project he encouraged the development of companies that would specialise in flying planes full of tourists to Spanish resorts. By the mid-1950s the package tour was an inescapable part of the travel industry landscape.

Zaragoza had originally thought of the new Benidorm as a somewhat bourgeois town of low-rise houses and hotels, parks and open spaces. But the pressure to go skywards was too great to be resisted. The soaring tower hotels simply meant more tourists and greater income for Benidorm.

They also created the ethos of a working-class holiday playground where, today, the comforts of home — in the case of British tourists, the full English breakfast, English pub-type watering holes, stand-up comics whose humour is of the type encountered in northern working-men’s clubs — are the norm. The city is also popular with Dutch and Belgian (Flemish) tourists who likewise find their playtime proclivities catered for in what is offered. Yet Benidorm is also popular with Spaniards, both as a holiday destination and for those with second homes there.

Born in 1922, Pedro Zaragoza Orts had intended a career at sea in the wake of his father who captained one of the ships of the Trasatlantica Line. But he realised that his heart was not in seafaring, and tried his hand at a variety of jobs throughout the length and breadth of Spain. At one stage he even worked as a driller for phosphorus 400m underground — before being recognised for his managerial talents and given a job in administration. Finally, with the death of his father two years later, he returned to Benidorm, still a young man.

He always liked to refer affectionately to the group of men he gathered round him to help him to realise his vision for Benidorm as the “grupo de locos”. An immense amount of hard work and stubbornness was behind the planning: King Juan Carlos called Pedro Zaragoza “El Tanque” — the tank — for his capacity to crush all obstacles to progress.

After retiring from his post as Mayor of Benidorm, Zaragoza went on to become president of Alicante council, and director general of tourist companies and activities for the Ministry of Information in Madrid. He also served as civil governor of Guadalajara, and a member of Parliament, and held directorships with many banks and large business.

Pedro Zaragoza, former Mayor of Benidorm, was born on May 15, 1922. He died on April 1, 2008, aged 85