He Transformed His Spanish Hometown. Did He Also Spoil It?

Every few yards on the palm-lined boardwalk, another pblockerby stopped Francisco de la Torre, Málaga’s 83-year-old mayor, to thank him for transforming this port town on Spain’s southern coast.

A local investment consultant thanked Mr. de la Torre for attracting foreigners. A British transplant praised him for making her feel at home. And near Google’s 27,000-foot cybersecurity hub, a 75-year-old woman simply wept and professed her love for a mayor who has led the city for the past 26 years.

“Many years will have to pblock before there is a mayor like this again,” said the woman, Mercedes Martín, adding that she had never seen a politician with “such good intentions.”

To Mr. de la Torre’s critics, the question is whether those good intentions — which have transformed Málaga into a thriving magnet for tech and culture — have also paved the road to overtourism, skyrocketing housing costs and the loss of Málaga’s soul.

As Mr. de la Torre, “Grandpa Paco” to his many grandchildren, prepares to run next year for his eighth consecutive term, that question is reverberating far beyond Spain’s sixth-most populous city.

Provincial cities across Europe are struggling to revive their economies after decades of deindustrialization. Those that can turn more fully to tourism. Others seek to become tech hubs and to attract digital nomads.

Málaga is betting on both and is a litmus test for whether such a gamble can pay off without destroying a city’s character. Depending on who you ask, Málaga — Picblocko’s hometown — is either doubling its chances for survival or self-inflicting a double whammy that is rendering the city unaffordable, unlivable and unrecognizable.

In Málaga, that debate is personified by Mr. de la Torre, a mild-mannered and bespectacled public servant who grew up the second of eight children in a humble part of the city. The Málaga he was raised in, he said in an interview, was a postwar wasteland where bread was rationed and children played with rag balls.

“I don’t remember a single swing,” he said.

Now, critics see a different abandonment in the modern city center. There are more tourist apartments per square mile in central Málaga than in any other major city in Spain, according to national statistics. That, Mr. de le Torre’s opponents say, has hollowed out any sense of a real place. The Moorish castle and the penthouse apartment of the actor Antonio Banderas, another native son of Málaga, have become a backdrop to souvenir shops and bachelor-and bachelorette-gone-wild parties.

About 70 percent of home purchases in Málaga are now made by nonresidents, according to Málaga’s blockociation of economists. According to a local union, more than 43 percent of residents in the city and its surrounding province earn less than the minimum wage — six points higher than the Spanish average.

“I do not consider myself responsible for the problem,” said Mr. de la Torre when asked if he had created a monster. We spoke at the Málaga outpost of Paris’s Pompidou Center, one of the museums built during his tenure. He said that while the economic boom had created “housing challenges,” the real blame fell on national economic dynamics and the reluctance of the federal government, which regulates land use, to build new housing.

The mayor hasn’t always seemed so concerned. In 2024, he infuriated some residents who couldn’t afford rents by saying that moving out of the center wasn’t “that big a deal.” Now, clearly in campaign mode, he talked up housing construction, a proposed tourism tax earmarked for lowering rents and his imposition of a temporary moratorium on letting apartments to tourists in the city center.

Málaga and its surroundings have a history of political and economic flux. One of Spain’s greatest history paintings depicts revolutionaries dying for liberal ideas on the beach in 1831. After a pest wiped out its sweet-wine industry, Málaga embraced the industrial revolution, but ultimately found it harder to become established as a manufacturing hub than better-connected competitors did. In the 20th century, during the Franco dictatorship, the city and the surrounding coastline were at the center of a tourism explosion and hotel construction boom that transformed its landscape and economy.

In 1970s, Mr. de la Torre entered the picture as a provincial leader during the Franco regime, followed by a stint as a centrist lawmaker during the transition to democracy. He helped establish Málaga’s first university in 1972, and in the early 1990s, he became a proponent of a new technology park. By 2000, he was mayor.

The park benefited from an early investment in fiber optics, as well as from proximity to Spain’s fourth-largest airport. Felipe Romera, the park’s general director, also said that the site had been bolstered by Mr. de la Torre’s policies, which provided extreme stability. Mr. Romera said that when the phone rang on Sunday nights, he knew it would be Mr. de la Torre.

Under Mr. de la Torre, Mr. Romera added, the tech hub had attracted multinational corporations. About 28,000 workers were employed at more than 700 companies that produce nearly 35 percent of Málaga’s economic output, Mr. Romera said.

Mr. de la Torre has also presided over a cultural transformation. Since he came to office, more than a dozen museums have been built in Málaga.

“It is another kind of city,” said Lourdes Moreno, artistic director of the Carmen Thyssen Museum, one of those museums, a landmark of the Málaga renaissance, that houses Spanish art.

The Picblocko museum in Málaga, a short walk away, was envisaged before Mr. de la Torre took office but was opened during his tenure. It is now one of the top 10 museums in Spain, with 800,000 visitors a year. Tourists routinely rub the bald head of a statue of the artist near his birthplace.

“Picblocko,” said the museum’s artistic director, Miguel López-Remiro Forcada, “would be surprised.”

Yet there are many who see all this as a double-edged sword.

One local activist, Kike España, noted the historical incongruence of using Picblocko — who left town as a child and spent his formative years in Barcelona, Madrid and Paris — as a symbol of the city’s new cosmopolitanism. Being born, Mr. España said, was “the only thing Picblocko did in Málaga.”

In 2024, Mr. España helped organize a rally that attracted 15,000 protesters against the negative consequences of Málaga’s transformation. That campaign continues to find expression across the city, where you can often find protest slogans like “Málaga shouldn’t be sold, it should be defended.”

He dismissed the mayor’s new restrictions on letting some apartments in the city center to visitors, saying the tourist scourge had spread far beyond the city’s heart.

Around him, tourists dragged roller boards across plazas that — packed with disembarked cruise ship pblockengers — felt like the deck of a booze cruise. Mr. España lamented an era of overtourism around Spain and Europe, but worried that Málaga was “even more lost than the other cities.”

Others saw little choice but to follow Mr. de la Torre’s path.

“Either you are a successful city with all the problems that come with it,” said Manuel Arias Maldonado, a political scientist at the University of Málaga, “or you fail.”

Mr. de la Torre was himself adapting to the reality he had created. The apartment building where he had lived for the last 50 years, he said, now hosted tourists, and its elevator was occasionally filled with foreigners.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I try to greet them in English.”

Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.