Bungee jumping and the Benidorm boom

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service on the history of travel. Our guest is Dr. Susan Houge Mackenzie, Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

First, we'll hear from the man responsible for the first commercial bungee jump.

Then, the pioneers of low-cost transatlantic flights and luxury cruises describe how they revolutionised travel.

Finally, we hear the remarkable stories of how Cancún and Benidorm transformed into holiday hotspots, involving General Franco, bikinis and excommunication.

Contributors: Dr. Susan Houge Mackenzie - Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism at the University of Otago in New Zealand. AJ Hackett - pioneer of the world's first commercial bungee jump. Edda Helgason - daughter of Sigurdur Helgason who launched Loftleioir Icelandic, the first budget transatlantic airline. Hans Indridason - ran Loftleioir Icelandic's sales and marketing department. Tor Stangeland - Captain of Sovereign of the Seas cruise ship. Juan Enríquez - son of Antonio Enríquez Savignac, who turned Cancún into a world-beating tourist destination. Pedro Zaragoza - former Mayor of Benidorm.

(Photo: Bungee jumping. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:05.0	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:08.0	This episode were focusing on events from the past which have had a bearing on tourism.
0:12.4	The travel trade is now worth billions of dollars a year
0:15.5	and many countries rely heavily on the income which can be generated by foreign visitors.
0:20.3	So how we got here is important to understand.
0:23.0	From the 1950s we'll be joining the budget flights by what became known as the
0:27.1	hippie airline.
0:28.1	It wasn't unusual that the hippies, it just took out the guitars and started playing and it was like a concert across the Atlantic.
0:37.0	Plus the world's first mega cruise ship.
0:41.0	Oh my God, that was everyone's first word when they got aboard.
0:46.6	Because there were those panoramic lifts going up and down, there was palm trees.
0:51.6	Also how Cancun in Mexico grew into a huge tourist destination, as did the Spanish
0:56.6	fishing village of Benidorm. One of the things I did was to issue a decree allowing the
1:01.4	bikini to be worn within the town limits of Benadon.
1:05.1	This caused a big scandal across Spain.
1:07.8	The Bishop of Valencia began the process of excommunicating me.
1:11.6	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but first we're taking the
1:14.7	plunge in New Zealand. This is the story of what is, for my money, one of the
1:19.3	strangest tourist trends of recent decades, the bungee jump. Here's Josephine McDermott.
1:24.8	It's 1986 and a bare-chested man in yellow shorts with shoulderlength dark hair is standing on Auckland's green-hyth bridge.
1:37.0	He's getting ready to jump into 19 meters of nothingness, head first, his ankles are tied together.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.