Tarot Card Meanings, Benidorm Style: the 22-Card Benidorm Tarot Deck

Tarot card meanings, Benidorm style: all 22 cards

The Benidorm deck is the twenty-two trumps of the old tarot, the Major Arcana, redrawn for the Costa Blanca. Each one carries five centuries of fortune telling and at least one sunburn.

Where tarot comes from

From Italian palaces to the Levante

Tarot began in the courts of northern Italy in the fifteenth century, as a card game called tarocchi. Dukes in Milan and Ferrara had decks painted in gold leaf, with an extra suit of picture cards called trumps.

The cards gained their mystical reputation in Paris in 1781, when the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed they held the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt. Historians found no evidence for it, but the idea stuck, and fortune tellers have read the trumps ever since.

In 1909 the artist Pamela Colman Smith drew the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, and most tarot cards you see today follow her pictures. The occult Order of the Golden Dawn gave each card an element and a planet. Brenda's deck keeps those, so the Tower still belongs to Mars and the Moon to Pisces.

How the cards found Benidorm, according to Brenda

The legend of the sangria jug

Brenda swears it happened like this. In the summer of 1967, a fisherman at dawn found a sangria jug bobbing off Benidorm Island, sealed with candle wax. Inside were twenty-two cards, and every one of them showed a Benidorm that hadn't been built yet.

There was a tower with two legs and a golden crown, decades before Intempo went up. There was a woman with towels on four sunbeds, long before the first package holiday landed. The fisherman's wife read them for the neighbours, then for the tourists, and the deck passed from hand to hand, bar to bar, down the strip.

Brenda says it came to her on a Thursday, after the bingo, from a cabaret magician who owed her a fiver. She's read them every night since. She also says she's thirty-four, so draw your own conclusions.

How to read the Benidorm deck

Three cards, three questions

Brenda lays three cards. The first is Getting there: the journey, the airport and whoever is late. The second is Your stay: the hotel, the pool and the drinks. The third is What's in store: the nights out, the shows and the stories you'll bring home.

A card that lands upside down is reversed. Its energy is blocked or overdone, so read it as a warning with a wink. Count the elements too. Three fire cards mean hot days and hotter nights, and three water cards mean somebody cries at karaoke.

The cards here were drawn new for benidorm.co.uk in 2026, in the style of the early twentieth-century decks. The meanings are Brenda's own.