Jaime Climent kept the tools. He kept more than that: over 150 photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, a dozen fishing rods made by hand, a bass drum that once belonged to the Grupo Iris musical ensemble, and a collection of fossils gathered from Benidorm and the surrounding Marina Baixa. All of it now belongs to the Benidorm Municipal Archive, on the ground floor of the city hall, where the oldest documents date from 1482.
Heritage Councillor Ana Pellicer described the donation as a collection of ethnological, palaeontological and photographic items of great interest, linked to the history, traditions and collective memory of Benidorm and the Marina Baixa. It is not the first gift from the Climent family, and it will not be the last of its kind — a separate family in the town has since given the same archive its own holdings.
What makes the carpentry tools worth keeping is the speed with which the world they served vanished. In 1950 Benidorm was a town of 2,726 people, and 118 of them held merchant marine captain's or pilot's licences — a density of deep-sea competence extraordinary for a place that size. Two years later the almadraba, the fixed tuna trap that had anchored the local economy, was closed because the catches no longer justified it. In 1956, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza Orts pushed through a General Urban Plan that rezoned the seafront for tourism.
Within a generation the fishing village was a tourist destination. Today the register counts 77,221 residents. The men who caulked hulls did not leave monuments, and the seafront where they worked is unrecognisable.
The fossils come from ground now inside the Serra Gelada Natural Park, a Cretaceous block of red marls and white limestone whose cliff face carries hanging dunes roughly 100,000 years old. Climent gathered stone that predates the town by an unimaginable margin, and iron that outlasted a trade by seventy years, and treated both as worth the same care.
There is a precedent for this in Benidorm. Most of the town's archaeological collection was assembled by Lluís Duart i Alabarta, the parish priest of Sant Jaume i Santa Anna, who arrived in October 1950 and dug at the Tossal site until his death in 1983. The archaeology room at the Museu Boca del Calvari carries his name. He was not an archaeologist by training. He simply noticed what was being lost while everyone else was watching the cranes.