The Beatles’ secret Spanish holiday is becoming a film, but where was John Lennon?

Three of the Beatles flew to Tenerife for a fortnight in 1963, sunburnt and driving a little red sports car around the island like they hadn’t a care in the world. John Lennon wasn’t with them though, and that gap in the story is now the plot of a film shooting across Tenerife this month.

Three Beatles landed in Tenerife while Lennon went elsewhere

On April 28 1963, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr flew to Santa Cruz de Tenerife for a 12-day break, staying in Los Realejos and working their way round Puerto de la Cruz, La Orotava and the slopes of Mount Teide. They came back badly sunburnt, and reportedly even came close to jamming with a local orchestra one evening.

John Lennon didn’t go with them though. He’d become a father three weeks earlier, with his son Julian born on April 8, and he spent his own 12 days on mainland Spain instead, travelling with the band’s manager Brian Epstein to Barcelona and then on to Torremolinos, near Málaga. Sixty-three years on, that quiet little holiday split has become the seed of a new film.

A missing Höfner bass drives the plot, though it’s fiction

Lennon no estuvo aquí (Lennon Wasn’t Here) isn’t a biopic. Director JuanMa Villar Betancort has set his story in the present day, following a Hamburg museum director who travels to Tenerife chasing a rumour that McCartney’s original Höfner 500/1 bass, the one he actually bought in 1961 and genuinely lost decades later, was left behind somewhere on the island during that 1963 trip.

Betancort has called it ‘a Thelma & Louise pop’, pulling his two leads, Astrid and Lucy, into what he describes as a mod universe of Vespas, Lambrettas and a 1960s-themed festival in Puerto de la Cruz. Worth being clear though, the missing bass on the island is the film’s invention rather than anything actually reported lost there. Real Beatles nerds will know McCartney’s bass did vanish for real, just not in the Canaries, and its eventual recovery in 2024, more than 50 years after it went missing, made headlines of its own.

The same red car Harrison and Starr actually drove

One prop needed no invention at all. A red Austin Healey Sprite once owned by Klaus Voormann, a close friend of the band from their Hamburg days, is being used in the film, and it’s the very car Harrison and Starr drove around the island in 1963. Two of the most famous young men on the planet, tearing round Tenerife in a two-seater with the roof down and, presumably, absolutely nobody stopping them for an autograph yet.

The cast includes Isabelle Stoffel, Pablo Carbonell, Laura Martí, Anabel Alonso, Teddy Bautista, Javier Gurruchaga, Natalia Verbeke, Agustina Palma and Nicolás Scarpino, with the Canary Islands government, the Cabildo de Tenerife and Televisión Canaria all backing the production.

Spain kept pulling the Beatles back

Tenerife wasn’t a one-off either. Three years later, Lennon was back in Spain on his own, this time in Almería filming the anti-war comedy How I Won the War, staying at what’s now Casa del Cine while he picked away at a new song between takes. He later told Rolling Stone he wrote it “in chunks” while out there, and that song turned out to be Strawberry Fields Forever.

Ringo, who’d sunbathed his way round Tenerife without Lennon in 1963, did fly out to Almería in 1966 to visit him and help with his 26th birthday celebrations in the Southern Spanish coast. 

Filming has taken over Tenerife’s streets this month

Around five of the shoot’s six weeks are being spent in the north of the island, in Puerto de la Cruz and the Orotava valley, with crews also closing streets in La Laguna this week for scenes set closer to the town’s historic centre.

No cinema release date has been confirmed yet. For now, the closest most fans will get is watching a corner of Tenerife dressed up as 1963 again, with the same red car, if not the same missing bass, doing the rounds.