Puerto Sherry as a mecca for posh partygoers: "We're not posh, we're well-dressed."

Elena, Pepi, Paula, and Sara get out of a taxi, powerful and made up to the nines. They wear gorgeous dresses in complementary colors—green, corinthian, white, and pink—gold earrings and pendants, heavy makeup, and high-heeled sandals. You'd think the five-o'clock heat wouldn't weigh you down like a millstone. But the national reputation of the four beach clubs in Puerto Sherry (El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz) is that you either look good or you'll never make it out the door. So they didn't take any chances: they came by train from Córdoba, ready to party for 13 hours, and they didn't want any surprises. Choosing their outfits was a challenge, Elena confesses, but they looked amazing. Although Pepi clarifies, just in case: "We're not posh, just well-dressed. Otherwise, you wouldn't even get in here."

Between 7,000 and 10,000 young people are busy enjoying themselves, carefree, in one of the country's posh party meccas this summer. The atmosphere is pure contradiction. Young people between 18 and 30 are basking in the sun at a social gathering between cars and pine forests near the beach, but no one is wearing a swimsuit. It's a Tuesday in the middle of summer, although it feels more like a Saturday, to the despair of more than one resident. They are practically uniformed: the men in long pants and shirts, preferably linen and light-colored; the women in dresses or two-piece suits, bejeweled and made up. It's clear that not all of them are posh, although they seem to aspire to be, or at least want to enjoy themselves. They come educated by dozens of influencer videos on TikTok setting the dress code for the coveted beach bars they will soon be able to access. “And the entry only says 'casual dress code.' That means it's for a christening, not a wedding,” Pepi chimes in, laughing as she takes a small water bottle filled with rum out of her bag.

“In this business, what you don't make aspirational doesn't last over time,” says Álvaro Pombo, one of the managers of three of the four beach bars in the area, who nevertheless avoids the posh label attributed to his customers. Between his three establishments—PhiPhi Beach, Playa Canalla, and Blu—as well as Margarita, owned by another owner, they have managed to establish a style of afternoon dining that began to gain popularity during the pandemic, when time restrictions and outdoor leisure activities shaped a generation, Generation Z, entering adulthood. “We didn't invent the afternoon dining experience; it already existed before, but after COVID, we decided to take a few more risks, delve deeper into the idea, and invest heavily so that the establishments would also be beautiful during the day, and that people would want to come,” adds Pombo, who, along with his brothers, owns more than 25 restaurants between Cádiz and Seville under the Grupo Banban brand.

Each space has its own vibe. Blu is packed with kids just turning 18, wearing shirts halfway unbuttoned and perfectly messy hair. Playa Canalla would be for its older siblings, those who escape from Madrid or Seville when their jobs or double degrees allow. PhiPhi, the oldest since 2017, is the most diverse and the coveted object of everyone present, along with Margarita. The screening of who gets in and who doesn't already begins with the advance ticket sales process by PR people, specifically selected to attract a specific target audience. But it ends with the security guards at the door. "It's not a posh atmosphere, but there are no punks or people in swimsuits. People are careful to come here because they come to flirt, to be liked," explains a person close to the venue's management who requests anonymity.

Aspirational posh?

Eustaquio Gutiérrez, an 18-year-old student from Malaga, agrees that he comes “to get laid,” but disagrees that it isn't a carefully curated environment for him, as he considers himself posh. “The atmosphere is great, it's our vibe,” he says, accompanied by Mario, Antonio, and David, all of the same age, background, and style. Gutiérrez claims he has friends who dress up as someone they're not to get into Puerto Sherry, but, as he's about to join Blu, he's not ready to go there and make a decision. Among other reasons, the term "posh" has so many connotations and nuances that it was a good opportunity for journalist Raquel Peláez to write her essay "I Want and I Can't: A History of the Posh People of Spain ." There are many types—Vox, cradle, pijipi, and creative, Peláez identifies—but perhaps the key is that “all the posh categories have to do with aspiration, that is, with the desire to appear in the social position to which one aspires, the one one desires, whether one actually occupies it or not.”

PhiPhi, on the inside, is the symbolic embodiment of that desire. What the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen aptly called the mechanism of pecuniary emulation, or "what drives the lower social classes to consume in an attempt to imitate the upper classes." Dressed for the occasion—yes, the reporter also dressed in linen just in case—for a price ranging from 15 to 30 euros per ticket, plus 9.50 a drink, one enters a universe where everything is visually appealing, colorful, ever-changing (the decor changes daily), and, above all, Instagrammable . The low ratings on Google Maps hint at the frustration of having fallen by the wayside of that sweet emulation. "Only the exhausted who couldn't get in comment," explains the same person close to the establishment.

“In the end, you tend to go out where you find your surroundings, with people your age, with people with similar tastes, music, clothes… We could say that people fit in on their own; you just help them find each other,” Pombo notes, summarizing the carefully crafted strategy that seems to have worked out well in this little corner of Puerto Sherry, a development that already embodies the aspirational world that exists within the establishments. The idyllic setting, still nursing the wounds of the 2000s brick-and-mortar crisis, was born in the 1980s around a marina as a more affordable refuge for an upper-middle class that couldn't afford to stay in the luxurious Vistahermosa residential area.

The road through the pine forests of this enclave is a pilgrimage of children dressed for "christenings," as Pepi would say. Most will have arrived hours earlier in El Puerto, laden with suitcases and outfits on hangers (so they don't wrinkle), on the hunt for a tourist apartment. They'll have unloaded their luggage, stocked up on groceries and alcohol at the nearest supermarket, changed, and sought out the coveted taxi early in the afternoon to take them to their summer experience. After the afternoon debacle, another taxi or bus returns to continue the nightlife, now at clubs in the city center or Vistahermosa, owned by those same beach clubs.

“What's good for some is bad for others. This is cheap tourism. The money they leave is either at Mercadona or here,” complains Miguel Ángel Gónzalez, a resident and taxi driver who has just made the umpteenth run from the city center to Puerto Sherry to drop off another group of kids. He's not the only one dissatisfied. Just a day earlier, the same parking lot that serves as a pre-party drinking spot hosted a demonstration in which more than a hundred residents shouted “enough is enough!” to drunken tourism. They complained about the resulting problems, from the proliferation of pirate taxis—the official ones are unable to handle such a large influx of people—to the noise, fights, and filth in the streets in the early hours of the morning, to the increase in illegal tourist accommodation.

Pombo, aware that tempers are running high, remains silent in the face of these complaints. Those around the establishments defend themselves by claiming that theirs "is not drunken tourism, since the establishments don't promote alcohol." "People are drinking, but we can't be blamed for this collateral damage," they argue, while boasting about having put El Puerto on the map of national and Portuguese tourism . So much so that this year's customer numbers have grown compared to the previous year and have now seen a steady increase for five years since the pandemic. The phenomenon has yet to show signs of exhaustion in a sector, the leisure sector, driven by constant trends. In the mecca of posh youthful afternoon socializing, they stick with that; they don't want to hear about problems. Beauty is the only option, of course, as long as it's dressed in a pastel linen shirt.