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Mogen Holmen, who was director of the Tivoli amusement park in Benalmádena on the Costa del Sol for more than thirty years, died on Wednesday 2 April.
Holmen arrived in Benalmádena from his native Denmark at the age of 28. He was working in his home country when someone offered him the job of director of an amusement park in Spain. At first he turned it down, but the offer "piqued" him and the next day he accepted. He became the right-hand man of Tivoli's first owner, the Dane Ben Olsen. This is what Morgen himself explains in the documentary Tívoli, by the Malaga-based production company AliquinDOC, which can be seen on the Canal Sur Más channel.
In the film he gives details of how he was shocked, in the early years, by the fact that Spanish women dressed completely in black and that the shows held in the park during the years of the dictatorship had to be controlled. He also talks about his relationship with the other Tivoli employees: "We were like a big family", he said in the documentary.
"He was a comical man, ironic in the way he expressed himself and very affable, a person who respected everyone and who knew how to ask for things. We all liked him", recalls Juan Francisco Carmona, a former employee at Tivoli. "He always gave his all for the park, he was a very special man and we all hold him in high esteem, we will always remember him with those seventies glasses he had in his youth", continued Carmona.
Holmen joined Tivoli around 1975 and continued when the business started to have financial problems and Olsen sought the support of an investor, the controversial Henrik Johansen, also owner of the Scandinavian Star, which suffered a serious fire during a cruise, which became known as one of the biggest disasters of the time. Holmen continued when Olsen sold the park to Rafael Gómez Sánchez, better known to all as 'Sandokán'.
After his retirement Holmen did not completely disconnect, "He has always been closely linked to Tivoli and has come to more than one of the rallies we have organised," say the former workers.
"At first he was reluctant to appear in the documentary, but for us he was very important, he had been the right-hand man of the original owners and was the living memory of Tivoli. He remembered everyone who had been there," said Sergio Rodrigo, who together with Lucía Muñoz directed the documentary which was first aired in 2024. They remember that Holmen was an avid reader of the press, a subscriber to Diario SUR, and after appearing in the documentary, people would stop him when he went for a walk around the town to say "hello".
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