Spain horror as drug dealers tout cocaine and Viagra during day in front of elderly Brits

It’s the day after the night before on Benidorm’s beer-spattered strip. English Square - the unofficial name given to the resort's party hub - is quiet now.

Well, quiet in terms of foot traffic. As despite the almost total absence of punters and the fact it’s two in the afternoon, each bar is showing off its sound system at what seems like max volume.

It’s in one of these bars that I sit with our photographer. Not even the disorientating mix of club music through the speakers and horse racing and cricket on the huge flat screens can distract us from the traders selling their wares 100 yards away.

But it’s not food or holiday tat that they’re pushing, as children and elderly women wander by - it’s drugs.

A few days previously we’d been warned that cocaine peddlers were rife and brazen, willing to try and flog you illegal substances at any given opportunity.

However, neither of us were prepared for the sheer relentlessness of the dealers, nor that they were able to tout their drugs in broad daylight on one of Benidorm’s best-known streets.

“You want Charlie [a common nickname for cocaine]?”; “Any Charlie for you, brother?”; “You want some sniff, mate?”

The sales pitch was always short and to the point. Failure to dismiss the offer out of hand would invite the follow-up proposal: “How about try before you buy?”

Wandering up to the Insomnia bar on Calle Gerona, a bar rep asks: “You coming in for one?”

“Nah, nah,” I reply, as a group of elderly women shuffle past the blue-shirted rep.

With the women less than five yards from the stocky rep, he makes his true intentions clear to me: “You want some Charlie, brother?”

This was the second offer I’d received that afternoon.

Minutes earlier another dealer outside the Broadway bar had made a similar sales pitch. After I rebuffed his offer of a “free shot” as I wasn’t “in a drinking mood”, the man countered: “What do you need? You need anything?”

The man, who appeared to be in his early 30s, ushered me into the bar to wait for his partner in crime.

Less than a quarter of an hour later, a man in a white T-shirt appeared. Despite the time, he was stocked with cocaine, cannabis and even Viagra.

When the photograper and I learned of the prevalence of drugs in Benidorm, we weren’t exactly surprised.

But the scale of the trade, its daytime ‘operating hours’ and the willingness of the dealers to market their substances within earshot of unsuspecting elderly tourists was deeply disturbing.