Brit started Spain’s tourist boom

George Langworthy opened Torremolinos and the Costa Del Sol’s first hotel for tourists, The Hacienda Santa Clara, in 1930.

The hotel would revolutionise the southern coast of Spain.

George, who was born in Rusholme in Manchester, had relocated to Spain from England with his wife in 1895.

They first settled in El Limonar, a bourgeois neighbourhood in Malaga, before moving three years later into a military fort in Torremolinos, which dates back to 1770.

George Langworthy basically started tourism on the Costa del Sol; nobody had thought about tourism until he decided to put his hotel up.

 Despite, in his later years, being unable to provide for the town’s poor like he once had done, his status in the town remained.

When he died in 1946 at the age of 80 it is reported that the whole town of Torremolinos attended the funeral to pay their respects to the town’s “adoptive son”.

Without any family to inherit his assets, Langworthy decided to leave what he had left over to the staff that had helped him at the hotel.

 The Castillo Santa Clara Hotel now sits on the site where the original hotel building was located. 

Intended or not, his is a more outstanding and defining legacy than any other in Torremolinos or on the Costa del Sol.