Benidorm's towering monument to Spain’s debt disaster

Upmarket In Tempo was designed to be a beacon of success but has come to symbolise failure

Behind In Tempo’s stunning exterior lies a story of problems and errors (AFP/Getty Images)

It was intended as a sign of Spain’s growing vitality – a gold-clad double tower, the tallest residential building in Europe, standing tall over the other skyscrapers in the concrete jungle that is Benidorm,

Instead the soaring In Tempo, an upmarket block of elegant flats, has become a highly visible reminder of how Spain binged on cheap debt and set itself on a course from which it has yet to properly recover.

Now it is open to bids from anyone prepared to attempt to turn around its fortunes after a court agreed this week a liquidation plan for its original developers – allowing the partly occupied building to be put on the market.

Potential buyers of the 650ft-high tower have four months to submit offers. While no asking price has been set, it is believed that In Tempo’s receivers value it at about €90m (£65m).

In 2005, a year before the start of building, developer Olga Urbana secured a €92m loan from the now-defunct savings bank Caixa Galicia. The company said In Tempo was “an unquestionable banner for the future”. It certainly was, but not in the way that the company or its lenders had hoped.

It has been beset by problems ever since ground was first broken at the site. Full of ambition, the developer extended the original plan for a 20-storey tower, more than doubling its size to 47 floors. After the completion of the first 23 storeys it became apparent that the architects had forgotten to include plans for a lift to the upper floors.

Plans were hastily made for a lift to be fitted. But it subsequently collapsed, hurting 13 construction workers, their injuries made worse when ambulances were unable to gain access to the site because a proper road entrance had been overlooked in an attempt to save money.

According to El País newspaper, by 2009 Caixa Galicia was insisting that workers at the site deposit their wages at the bank, in return for releasing additional tranches of the loan.

More than a third of the 269 homes inside the towers have been sold, for prices between about €190,000 and €1.6m.

For Benidorm itself, the struggling In Tempo is a blow to its plans to shrug off its reputation as a cheap holiday destination for northern Europeans who want to spend their time off getting hopelessly drunk.

The city, a small fishing village as recently as the 1960s, is hoping to become a Unesco World Heritage site on the back of its role in introducing mass tourism to Spain under the Franco dictatorship. Officials describe the plans to take the resort upmarket as a way of attracting a “better type of tourist”.

The proposed sale of In Tempo is also a telling reminder to Spaniards of the economic pain suffered since 2007, when the credit markets collapsed, sending the country into perhaps its worst recession.

They go to the polls in Sunday’s general election when they will have to decide whether to back the governing PP, which has introduced savage spending cuts to tackle the crisis, the leftist PSOE, which ran the country during the economic crisis, or new parties that have promised a break with the past.