By Giles Tremlett and Madrid
THE blonde on the poster stares out at a beautiful blue sea, hat in hand and the delicate sand of the Costa Brava between her toes.
Or that is what the latest advertising campaign by the tourist board claims. But the idyllic photograph promoting Spain's north-east Mediterranean coast was taken in the Bahamas in the Caribbean.
Left: Costa Brava, Bahamas; Right: The real Costa Brava.Credit: Reuters
The unrepentant tourist board admitted the picture came from a series shot on a beach halfway across the world, but denied this was cheating.
It even conceded that the picture, sold by the Getty Images picture agency, was digitally altered to dull the shiny yellow sand and make it look more like a greyer beach of the real Costa Brava.
But the agency refused to accept that the resulting advertisement, with its unintentionally ironic slogan, "Where does the Costa Brava start?", was a lie.
Costa Brava Girona tourism board director Dolors Batalle said it had simply failed to find pictures "of sufficient quality" of the real Costa Brava to illustrate its "conceptual" campaign.
"Our intention is not to lie, nor to suggest that the Bahamas are really better than the Costa Brava," Ms Batalle said.
She said no one should feel cheated if they travelled to the Costa Brava and found it did not look like the place in the photograph. It would be "a wicked interpretation" to suggest the board was trying to hide the truth.
The Costa Brava campaign contains a second mystery.
An accompanying photograph is meant to show a mountaineer tramping through the brilliant white snow of the nearby Pyrenees.
Together, the blurb claims, the photographs show people enjoying the same pure water. The "spray of the waves" and the "snow of the mountains" is meant to come from the same source.
But is the second photograph, which looks as though it could have been taken in Nepal, really of the Pyrenees?
Locals have their doubts. Ms Batalle has admitted she also was not sure.
GUARDIAN