The Spain of 1950, though more than 10 years removed from the immediate horror of the Civil War, was still caught in the grips of the trauma it effected and the dictatorship it left behind. It was not an age of economic growth, self-promotion or tourism. Most Costa Brava families still supported themselves off the sea, food staples were sold in strict rations and lives were incredibly localised—even non-Catalan Spaniards were a rare sight.
With all the natural beauty and sunshine that it has to offer, it’s surprising that the Costa Brava remained covertly poised for discovery for so long. But by the early Fifties, this shining jewel in the already heavy crown of Spanish holiday-making was still all but unknown to outsiders.
So what was the catalyst that unleashed generations of adoring tourists and saw a dramatic metamorphis envelope the region? Like most great transformations, this one started with a beautiful woman. But not just any woman, and she wasn’t just passing through the area. Her name was Ava Gardner, and she was a celebrity among celebrities, the lover of Frank Sinatra and popularly considered the most beautiful woman on the planet. And her reason for coming was the making of a big-budget Hollywood movie.
The announcement came in 1950. Tossa de Mar, at the time a small fishing village, was to host Gardner and fellow film star James Mason for two months during the filming of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
By the time the finished film was shown in Girona cinemas in 1952 (having been hotly anticipated by the local population for nearly two years), the first Pandora tourists had already arrived on the shores of the Costa Brava. An exhibition held several years ago at Girona’s Museu del Cinema, in honour of the film’s 50th anniversary, looked in depth at this unexpected effect of the film. Included in the show was a particularly telling anecdote from a Tossa de Mar local, Señor Fàbrega, who remembered the time well: “Several months after the filming, when the village had again become a lonely place, came the first group of English tourists who had seen the film in England. Because of the film, they had discovered a country. Just a little while later, the first busloads of Germans made the rounds of local villages for the same reason. The boarding houses started turning into hotels, and the village people rented out their houses to a tourist population that was already becoming massive […] It was the birth of the Costa Brava.”
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