A familiar part of Playa Flamenca since 2002.
Sixty five independent businesses, three open air levels, and not a single chain among them. This is what Flamenca Beach Centro Comercial actually is, written by the people who run it.
Flamenca Beach opened in 2002, on a stretch of the Orihuela Costa that was still filling in. Playa Flamenca had the beach and the coves, and it was gaining the residents, but it did not yet have a middle. The centre became one.
Twenty four years on it is still doing the same job. It is where people eat on a Friday, get their hair cut on a Tuesday, take the dog to the vet, drop the children at preschool, sort the paperwork with the gestoría, buy flowers for someone, and sit outside until the light goes.
Open to the air, and stacked
The centre is not a mall. There is no roof over the middle of it and no air conditioning in the walkways. It is built on three levels, with the businesses opening onto open terraces and walkways rather than an internal corridor.
Most people arrive on the middle floor, which is why our directory starts there. The lower level holds the bars, the takeaways, the preschool and the charity hub. The upper level has the steakhouse, the clinics, the offices and the play centre.
It means the place has weather. In August the terraces fill at nine in the evening and stay full. In February they fill at lunchtime instead. Either way people are outside, which is the entire reason anyone moved here.
We are not the English centre
We get called that, and we understand why. A good number of our businesses are British or Irish owned, and English is the language you hear most often on the terraces.
But it is not an accurate description of who trades here. Among the sixty five you will find a Scandinavian preschool teaching a Swedish curriculum, an Argentinian parrilla, an official Guinness pub, an Italian ristorante, a Hungarian steak and goulash house, Chinese and Thai kitchens, Indian restaurants, Spanish clinics and gestorías, a Dutch owned business, Polish and Ukrainian owners, and a Colombian one.
Eleven nationalities at the last count, in a centre of sixty five units. That is closer to the truth of the place than any single flag.
What is happening now
The centre is being repaired and improved, and we would rather be straightforward about the state of it than pretend otherwise. Some of it has been neglected. Some of it is already fixed.
The rooftop area has been renewed, around ninety per cent of the broken floor tiles have been repaired, the main ramp has been reformed and painted, a lift has been properly overhauled, and there is now a cleaning company on site seven days a week. Fire extinguishers and defibrillators have been installed on every level.
Electrical and lighting work starts in September. Further roof works follow once the heat eases. There is a longer list after that.
We write these updates as we go, in Stories.
What we are not changing
The businesses. They are the centre, and most of them have been here far longer than any committee. The point of the work is to give them a better place to trade in, not to turn Flamenca Beach into somewhere it has never been.
If you want the short version: it is an open air centre in Playa Flamenca, it has been here since 2002, everything in it is independent, and the terraces are still full at nine on a Friday.