A tour of some Benidorm pubs turned out to be a fairly mild experience – but falling foul of the Spanish resort’s notorious ‘potato men’ can be genuinely dangerous
A YouTuber who set out to show the truth behind Benidorm’s rowdy nightlife on a tour of its “roughest pubs” found himself attacked in the street.
In a recent video titled Throat Punched On Benidorm’s Roughest Pub Crawl, social media star Wendall found himself assaulted by a gang of street scammers running the Spanish resort’s notorious “potato men” racket. In the potato man scam, local petty crooks set up a table in the street and hide a single pea under one of three hollowed-out potatoes.
After a stooge in the audience appears to win a fistful of cash by correctly guessing which potato is concealing the pea, tipsy tourists are lured into gambling away their money despite having no chance of success. After Wendall attempted to film a game in progress, the situation swiftly turned ugly, with one of them grabbing him by the throat.
As soon as the scammers saw Wendall’s camera, they tried to bully him away from the area. “I’m just filming an interesting thing,” he protested, asking “What’s the problem with me filming?” But they soon became increasingly aggressive.
After the attack attack, he complained: “He punched me in the throat, just for filming the street.”
Wendall sensibly made himself scarce, and instead retreated into some more of what he cheerfully described as “some of Benidorm’s roughest pubs”. There he met dozens of well-refreshed and generally shirtless Brits enjoying stag weekends, hen dos or, in some cases, months-long holidays in the popular resort.
Most of the people he met there seemed to be having a tremendous time – with quite a few enjoying pints at Uncle Ron’s bar where a pint of lager costs just €1, or around 90p. The owner of Uncle Ron’s prides himself on selling the cheapest pint in Benidorm, and it could quite easily be the cheapest pint in Western Europe.
While the bargain pint is a loss-leader, it draws in punters who will then who on to order some food to go with it, the owner explains. That he still does make a profit on the beer, “just not very much.”
Off the main strip, however many of Benidorm’s bars are not doing so well. Quite a few have closed altogether. Wendall found one closed-down bar that had been converted into a crude dormitory for rough sleepers.
Wendall decided to finish his pub crawl at one of the resort’s most notorious boozer. “Pretty much everybody I spoke to as I went around said the Red Lion’s the roughest pub,” he said. “It hasn’t got a good reputation.”
In fact, Wendall seemed to have a rare old time, being co-opted by the bloke stationed outside to help him lure punters inside with the offer of a free shot. Overall Benidorm’s roughest pub offered a fairly mild experience.
“If there’s going to be a brawl on the strip,“it’s normally outside there,” he admitted, but added “it’s the centre of the Benidorm strip really. So what do you expect?”
Certainly, as a venue for an early-evening drink, it’s a much safer prospect than trying to watch the potato men at work.