Adios to the Costa Brava

For years it has been the Spanish holiday playground of Britons who enjoy nothing better than donning a kiss-me-quick hat as they sit in an 'authentic' pub to eat egg and chips washed down with cheap lager.

Now, it seems, our love affair with the Costa Brava has deflated like a punctured lilo.

The area is to be axed from package holiday brochures after a 25 per cent drop in bookings to the land of sun, sea and sangria.

The coastline, famous for the resorts of Lloret de Mar and Tossa de Mar, is to be dumped by First Choice - with Cosmos saying it may follow suit.

Club 18-30 is also ditching Lloret and even Benidorm on the Costa Blanca because it is becoming 'too much like Blackpool' - a town which is itself wrestling with its image.

Cosmos is pulling Ibiza as a family destination, while Thomas Cook says holidaymakers are increasingly looking for alternatives to Spain.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Costa Brava opened up the country to the first generation of Britons to take a foreign holiday - and led tourists on to Majorca and the Costa del Sol.

Holiday firms say rising hotel prices and competition from budget airlines have made it uneconomic. There is also a suggestion that tourists are bored with the same kind of hotel in the same kind of resort and are now looking for more adventurous destinations.

First Choice said the Costa Brava was suffering from 'destination fatigue' as it sought to promote newer holiday hotspots such as Bulgaria, North Africa and Dubai.

But Keith Betton, of the Association of British Travel Agents, believes Spain will never truly go out of fashion. He said: 'This is a short-term reaction to the fact that the euro is expensive for us at the moment.

'Spain is going to remain the No.1 package holiday destination of all time. At the moment, though, the growth is elsewhere.'