San Juan Beach

While Miami Beach claims the crown for Art Deco lifeguard towers, Alicante recently borrowed the playbook, on purpose. In 2023, the city’s tourism board commissioned Alicante-born artist Antonyo Marest to design a new generation of lifeguard posts for Playa de San Juan, candy-colored sentinels in pink and turquoise that Marest built specifically to evoke Miami’s Art Deco skyline, filtered through a Mediterranean sensibility. The result: structures that wouldn’t look out of place on South Beach, complete with hand-painted ‘ALICANTE BEACH’ lettering that locals find endlessly amusing since the beach is technically in San Juan, not Alicante proper.

The first tower went up in May 2023 near Calle El Palmeral, and within a day of its unveiling had racked up 40,000 impressions on the tourism board’s Instagram account. A second followed soon after, near the intersection with Paseo de Niza, part of a plan that could eventually see as many as sixteen of Marest’s designs scattered along the sand. Nine older lifeguard chairs still dot the rest of the beach, waiting their turn for a makeover that has, by any measure, worked exactly as intended: a photogenic landmark built to be photographed, on a beach that stretches some seven kilometers north from Alicante’s city limits.