Tourists in Spain’s Costa Blanca will be slapped with a €250 (£210) fine if they try to reserve early-morning spaces on the beach, authorities have said.

The measure is aimed at dissuading beachgoers in Calpe from leaving towels, chairs and umbrellas on the beach before 9.30am.

The crackdown also applies to unattended belongings left by the sea for more than three hours, with tourism leaders saying they are not prepared to endure “empty but reserved” loungers this summer at the town, near Benidorm.

“For some years, we have received numerous complaints during the summer about the reservation of space on the beach,” Calpe city council said.

‘Indiscriminate occupation’ 

The €250 penalty will prevent beachgoers arriving “in the middle of the morning and find[ing] metres of beach occupied” with belongings, with their owners nowhere in sight, the council added.

“This measure prohibits the indiscriminate occupation of the public domain, especially the beach, with items such as chairs, hammocks and parasols at the start of the day,” according to the statement which added that the “bad habits” made cleaning the beaches more difficult.

Carole Saunders, a British former councillor in Calpe for many years, insisted the measure was not anti-tourist.

“This is aimed at the madrileños who try to reserve a sun lounger at 7.30am before they get their bread for the day,” she told The Telegraph.

“It is not aimed at the tourists – we live off tourism here. But it is to try to stop people bagging these sun loungers. They do this while the cleaners are cleaning up the beach.”

Footage on social media is widely shared showing tourists in Spain queuing outside hotel gates before racing to reserve poolside loungers first thing in the morning.

“The only thing that lets this hotel down. Queuing for the gates to open at 8am,” Clare Moore posted on TikTok on Wednesday.

She shared footage from Hotel Bitácora on the Canary Island of Tenerife which showed tourists running through the pool area, flinging towels on to sunbeds.

Similar scenes played out in videos from a hotel on the Costa Daurada in Catalonia and at Holiday Village in Benálmadena on the Costa del Sol.

“My idea of holiday hell,” wrote Claire Chivers under her post, in which a man can be seen throwing towels on as many as five loungers.

Sunbed wars are a yearly conflict on the beaches of Spain during summer but this year they have started early.

It comes amid a rise in anti-tourism protests across Spain as residents demonstrate against rising rents, house prices and overcrowding during the summer months.

On Sunday, another protest is planned in Mallorca under the slogan “Menys Turisme, Mas Vida” (Less Tourism, More Life).

At a protest in Barcelona earlier this month, demonstrators soaked tourists by squirting them with water pistols and shouting: “Tourists go home.”