A buffet in an Egyptian tomb

Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces, tennis courts, a swim-up bar, a miniature golf course and palm trees. It is a synthetic paradise for Europeans who want sun in November in their own time zone; it is more unnatural than Las Vegas.

Atlantico has roughly one thousand covers, if you include an annexe room styled like an Egyptian tomb with a coffee machine, and an annexe terrace. (Each terrace has its own familiar, or cat.) It is painted in shades of generic blue, for the ocean I suppose, nearby but unvisited, for the sand is black, and the waves are unfriendly. There are legions of white-clothed tables; a striped floor; odd white tubes as decor, sprouting from the floor; kindly, excitable waiters and almost no natural light. It exudes gloom. It smells of peas.

It opens for dinner at 6 p.m. sharp — we are in Spain, but we are on German time, for most of the guests are German — but the line begins to form at 5.30 p.m. The line is extraordinarily dressed — intense moustaches, metallic lipstick — and bad-tempered, with subtle, international jostling. There is a dress code in Atlantico because, if there were not, everyone would be wearing matching bathrobes, or nude. (A is sent back to change out of what the dress code calls ‘short trousers’.) At six the queue surges forward with anxiety but no hunger, for what hunger is there ‘on vacation’? No, this is remembrance of the foulness of urban living.