Elena, Pepi, Paula and Sara get out of a powerful and blank staple taxi. Dressed in complementary colors – green, Corinth, white and pink -, golden slopes and pendants, either makeup and heel sandals. Anyone would say that the heat of five in the afternoon does not weigh like a slab. But the national fame of the four beach clubs From Puerto Sherry (the port of Santa María, Cádiz) is that either you are well fixed or not pass from the door. So they have not played it: they come by train from Córdoba willing to be 13 hours of party and do not want unforeseen events. Choosing Modelito has cost theirs, Elena confesses, but they give the hit. Although Pepi clarifies by case: “We are not pijas, only well dressed. It is that if not here or enter.”
Between 7,000 and 10,000 young people, they strive to enjoy, carefree, in one of the mecas of the Pijerío this summer’s country party. The environment is pure contradiction. Young people between 18 and 30 years old in the sun in a bottle between cars and pine forests close to the beach, but there is no one in a swimsuit. It is a Tuesday in the middle of the summer, although rather it seems Saturday, for despair of more than one neighbor. They are almost uniformed: they, in long pants and shirt, preferably linen and clear tones; They, with dresses or two pieces, enjoyadas and makeup. It is evident that not all are pijos, although they seem to aspire to it or, at least, to want to enjoy as such. They come so much after tens of videos of influencers That, in Tiktok, they mark the clothing code of the coveted chiringuitos to which they will access shortly after. “And that at the entrance only says ‘casual label’. It will refer to the fact that it is baptized and not wedding,” third pepi between laughs, while taking out a bottle of water filled with rum.
“In this business, what you do not make it aspirational does not last over time,” advances one of those responsible for three of the four chiringuitos in the area, Álvaro Pombo, who, however, avoids the label of pijos that blames his clients. Among its three stores, Phiphi Beach, Carala Playa and Blu, in addition to the Margarita, from another owner, have managed to settle a model of tardeo which began to become known in those times of pandemic in which the hourly restrictions and outdoor leisure marked a generation, the Z, which incorporated into adult life. “The afternoon we did not invent it, it already existed from before, but after the Covid we launched ourselves to risk a little more, deepen the idea and invest strong so that the premises were also beautiful for the day, and that the public wanted to come to the public,” adds Pombo, owner along with his brothers of more than 25 hospitality premises between Cádiz and Sevilla under the brand of Grupo Banban.
Each space has its roll. Blu looks full of freshly completed kids with unbuttoned shirts halfway and disorderly perfectly perfect. The Canalla Beach would be for their older brothers, those who escape from Madrid or Seville when their work or double grade allows it. The PHIPHI, the oldest since 2017, is the most transversal and object of coveted desire for all present, next to the Margarita. The screening of who enters and who does not begin in the early sale of tickets made by public relations, expressly selected to attract a specific target audience. But it ends in the members of the door security. “It is not a pijo atmosphere, but there are no canis or people in a swimsuit. People take care to come here because they come to flirt, to like it,” defends a person close to the management of the premises who calls for anonymity.
Pijo aspirational?
Eustaquio Gutiérrez, 18 -year -old from Malaga, agrees on what is “Pillar Cacho”, but not that it is not a carefully chosen environment for him, which is considered Pijo. “The atmosphere is great, is our roll,” he says, accompanied by Mario, Antonio and David, all of the same age, formation and style. Gutiérrez says he has friends who disguise what they are not to be able to go to Puerto Sherry, but, about to access Blu, it is not there to be defined. Among other things because the name of Pijo has so many connotations and nuances that he gave well for the journalist Raquel Peláez to write her essay I want and I can’t. A story of the Pijos de España. There are many types – vox, cradle, pijipi and creative, identifies peláez -, but perhaps the key is in “all categories Pijistic They have to do with the aspirational, that is, with the desire to appear the social position to which it is aspired, the one that is desired, really occupies or not ”.
Phiphi, inside, is the symbolic incarnation of that desire. What the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen called with Tino the pecunaria emulation mechanism or “which leads to the lower social classes to consume to try to imitate the superiors.” Dress for the occasion – yes, the reporter also dressed in linen in case the flies – for a price that goes from 15 to 30 euros per entrance, plus 9.50 the cup, one penetrates a universe in which everything is attractive in sight, colorful, changing (the decoration mutates every day) and, above all, instagrameable. The low assessment of your reviews in Google Maps gives frustration clues that produces to have stayed on the path of that sweet emulation. “Only the Revalents who have not been able to enter,” defends the same person close to the premises.
“In the end, one usually goes where he meets his surroundings, with people of his age, with related people in tastes, music, clothing … we can say that people fits themselves, one only makes help to find themselves,” says Pombo, as a summary of that medically sought -sought strategy that seems to have gone well in that corner of Puerto Sherry, an urbanization that already represents in itself all that aspirational world that is lived within the places. The idyllic environment, which is still heals the wounds of that brick crisis of the 2000s, was born in the eighties around a sports port as a more affordable refuge for a middle-high class that could not afford to stop in the luxurious residential of Vistahermosa.
The road between Pinares of that enclave is a pilgrimage of boys “baptized” dresses, which Pepi would say. Most will have arrived before the port loaded with suitcases and looks On perchas (so they don’t wrinkle), hunting for a tourist apartment. They will have released the luggage, replaced food and alcohol in the nearest supermarket, they will have changed and searched early in the afternoon the coveted taxi that leads them to live their summer experience. After the afternoon, another taxi or bus back to follow the nightfall, now in discos from the center or Vistahermosa that are owned by those same beach clubs.
“What is good for some is bad for others. This is a cheap tourism. The money they leave is in Mercadona or here,” complains Miguel Ángel Gónzalez, a neighbor and taxi driver who has just made the nth career of the center to Puerto Sherry to leave another kid of kids. It is not the only disagreement. Just one day before, that same parking lot that serves as a bottle, previously hosted a demonstration in which more than a hundred neighbors shouted “enough!” to drunken tourism. They complained about the problems derived, from the proliferation of pirate taxis – the officers are unable to absorb so much flow of people -, noise, fights and dirt at dawn in the streets or the increase in illegal tourist homes.
Pombo, aware that the spirits are heated, mutis before those complaints. From the surroundings of the premises they defend themselves alleging that theirs “is not drunken tourism, since alcohol promotion is not promoted.” “People make a bottle, but we can’t attribute those collateral damage,” they allege, as they take chest to have placed El Puerto on the map of national and Portuguese tourism. So much so that this year the numbers of customers have grown with respect to the previous one and there are already five constant increase from the pandemic. The phenomenon still does not give symptoms of exhaustion in a sector, that of leisure, which moves by constant fashions. In the mecca of the youthful pijerio of the afternoon they keep that, they do not want to hear about problems. It only fits beauty, yes, whenever she dressed in linen pastel.