Many, many years ago, Llafranc was not well-known.
I remember coming with my grandfather, and we had to stop halfway to let the car cool down. It was like the village of Asterix. The whole coast was occupied by the Romans… All of it? No! A village populated by die-hard peasants still resisted…
And in that village, facing the sea, was the Llafranch Hotel (back then, we wrote it with an “h”). The person who ran it called himself “the Gypsy of the Costa Brava” (or simply “the Gypsy”), whom I remember as a character, to say the least, strange, who went every day dressed up as something (flamenco, bullfighter,…) and walking around the town (without bothering anyone).
Some foreigner who passed through Llafranc must have freaked out and told another, and this one to another, and so Llafranc began to appear in the secret guides as an unprecedented corner on the Spanish Costa Brava with a unique landscape and where you could stay in a hotel run by a character, to say the least, peculiar.
Hence, famous foreigners began to come to this “different” and privileged place. If you enter the hotel, you will still enjoy many photos with characters that you will surely know.
In 1986, the Gypsy died. His nephew, Carles Bisbe, continued with the business, but in order to remain a reference, without duplicating the figure of the uncle, he mimicked the character of Rambo.
He started by making some popular cocktails. I remember that he dressed as Rambo and with a machete he was cutting bottles of cava and pouring them into a huge bowl, previously passing the liquid through the bald head of his waiter and the sweat of Rambo himself, combined with multiple other liqueurs and concoctions. I am convinced that, in addition to sweat, there must have been traces of bottles and other things in the bowl. But, we know, people like the show, and we would crowd to see it. And, to make matters worse, at the end he distributed the free cocktail among the attendees, who, being free, gladly drank…. Before and after the cocktail, the cash register, surrounded by an audience eager to attend the show, was smoking. It was such a good business that the Rambo cocktail became a benchmark, and the hotel became “the” cocktail bar. And the cash register didn’t stop ringing, which made the cocktail bigger and bigger, even with a float in the middle of the street worthy of the most popular festival. In 2014, Rambo even descended by helicopter and went down to the beach dodging impressive fireworks… But, along with the show, he was also accompanied by criticism from neighbors, which made him have to reduce the intensity of the show and limit it to his restaurant.
Currently, in summer, Carles Bisbe resurrects Rambo on Saturday nights. He climbs up to the bar counter, plays his character in his own way, and, depending on the blood alcohol level of his audience, they cheer him on and record him non-stop. The show ends around 03:00 in the morning when, perched on the bar of his bar and with little clothes other than a coconut acting as a loincloth, he grabs the hose and wets everyone who is there. But don’t worry about the bar furniture. With gin-tonics at €15, and the box smoking, it can be renewed.
