world, except at the Hotel Vera Playa Club everyone was naked.
Playa means “beach” and Vera Playa is simply “beach in Vera.” But the beach has some history. It’s where Hannibal allegedly landed his elephants in his bid to defeat the Roman Empire in the Second Punic War, and more recently, in what was called the Palomares Incident of 1966, it’s just a few kilometers from where an American B-52 bomber carrying four H-bombs crashed after a midair collision with a refueling tanker. Although none of the bombs exploded, the soil was contaminated by plutonium dust, and the U.S. government spent billions of dollars digging up the Spanish dirt, shipping it home, and burying it in South Carolina.
The hotel was constructed on the ruins of an abandoned desalination plant, and roads originally built to truck freshwater out are now used to import the area’s newest economic driver: naked tourists.
I asked the Centro de Gestión y Promoción Turística del Ayuntamiento de Vera, the official tourism bureau of the city, for some statistics on tourism. Here’s a rough translation of its official report: “With respect to data recorded at that point we can state that during the year 2012 there were a total of 7,687 visits, of which 73.02 percent were made by domestic tourists, and the remaining 26.98 percent, by foreign tourists.”
For the number one industry in the area that doesn’t seem like a lot of people. But then the data is pulled from tourists visiting the information desk at the convent in downtown Vera, which was hosting an art show by local students when I stopped by. According to the tourist bureau’s data, only six Americans visited Vera in 2012. Which really surprised me. Even if you’re not into naturism, this is a strikingly beautiful part of Spain. But maybe Americans really are more prudish than Europeans.
I can’t imagine any of the naturists I’d seen at the beach bothering to go to the city center to look at an old convent. Not while the sun is shining and they can keep their clothes off. However, I do find the ratio of Spanish tourists to foreign tourists informative. Most of the guests at the Hotel Vera Playa Club were Spanish, with tourists from the United Kingdom outnumbering the second-largest group, Germans, 5 to 1. The rest were French or Italian with some glamorous Russians thrown in. I’m not kidding about the Russians. The men were handsome, the women were gorgeous, and they showed up for breakfast drinking Cava and wearing exquisite clothes. They were movie stars compared with the rest of us in our T-shirts and shorts. And, yes, you are required to wear clothes in the dining room at the hotel. But seeing the beautiful Russians was the first time in a nonsexual social nude setting when I thought that I couldn’t wait to see what they looked like naked. It was a juvenile impulse, I admit it, but the Russians did not disappoint.
I’m not surprised that the foreign tourists are from countries with miserable weather. Why wouldn’t they want to leave the cold and wet of northern Europe for the dry heat and blistering sun of southern Spain? It is semiarid desert and looks a bit like the iconic American Southwest, which explains why this part of Spain has been the backdrop for Lawrence of Arabia ; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ; A Fistful of Dollars ; and parts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , among others .
The beach at Vera Playa, which was designated naturist by the local government in 1979, is more than two kilometers of flat, pebbly sand. Of course now that I think about it, the Spanish authorities probably decided that an area with a history of radioactive contamination might as well be designated naturist.
In the 1980s the urbanizaciónes began being developed along the naturist beach. The first was called the Natsun—which I’m guessing is a portmanteau of “naturist” and “sunshine”—followed by others with names like Vera Natura, Natura World, Armony Natura,
Playa means “beach” and Vera Playa is simply “beach in Vera.” But the beach has some history. It’s where Hannibal allegedly landed his elephants in his bid to defeat the Roman Empire in the Second Punic War, and more recently, in what was called the Palomares Incident of 1966, it’s just a few kilometers from where an American B-52 bomber carrying four H-bombs crashed after a midair collision with a refueling tanker. Although none of the bombs exploded, the soil was contaminated by plutonium dust, and the U.S. government spent billions of dollars digging up the Spanish dirt, shipping it home, and burying it in South Carolina.
The hotel was constructed on the ruins of an abandoned desalination plant, and roads originally built to truck freshwater out are now used to import the area’s newest economic driver: naked tourists.
I asked the Centro de Gestión y Promoción Turística del Ayuntamiento de Vera, the official tourism bureau of the city, for some statistics on tourism. Here’s a rough translation of its official report: “With respect to data recorded at that point we can state that during the year 2012 there were a total of 7,687 visits, of which 73.02 percent were made by domestic tourists, and the remaining 26.98 percent, by foreign tourists.”
For the number one industry in the area that doesn’t seem like a lot of people. But then the data is pulled from tourists visiting the information desk at the convent in downtown Vera, which was hosting an art show by local students when I stopped by. According to the tourist bureau’s data, only six Americans visited Vera in 2012. Which really surprised me. Even if you’re not into naturism, this is a strikingly beautiful part of Spain. But maybe Americans really are more prudish than Europeans.
I can’t imagine any of the naturists I’d seen at the beach bothering to go to the city center to look at an old convent. Not while the sun is shining and they can keep their clothes off. However, I do find the ratio of Spanish tourists to foreign tourists informative. Most of the guests at the Hotel Vera Playa Club were Spanish, with tourists from the United Kingdom outnumbering the second-largest group, Germans, 5 to 1. The rest were French or Italian with some glamorous Russians thrown in. I’m not kidding about the Russians. The men were handsome, the women were gorgeous, and they showed up for breakfast drinking Cava and wearing exquisite clothes. They were movie stars compared with the rest of us in our T-shirts and shorts. And, yes, you are required to wear clothes in the dining room at the hotel. But seeing the beautiful Russians was the first time in a nonsexual social nude setting when I thought that I couldn’t wait to see what they looked like naked. It was a juvenile impulse, I admit it, but the Russians did not disappoint.
I’m not surprised that the foreign tourists are from countries with miserable weather. Why wouldn’t they want to leave the cold and wet of northern Europe for the dry heat and blistering sun of southern Spain? It is semiarid desert and looks a bit like the iconic American Southwest, which explains why this part of Spain has been the backdrop for Lawrence of Arabia ; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ; A Fistful of Dollars ; and parts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , among others .
The beach at Vera Playa, which was designated naturist by the local government in 1979, is more than two kilometers of flat, pebbly sand. Of course now that I think about it, the Spanish authorities probably decided that an area with a history of radioactive contamination might as well be designated naturist.
In the 1980s the urbanizaciónes began being developed along the naturist beach. The first was called the Natsun—which I’m guessing is a portmanteau of “naturist” and “sunshine”—followed by others with names like Vera Natura, Natura World, Armony Natura,
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