Benalmádena Stupa

The tallest stupa in Europe stands on a hillside above Benalmádena, thirty-three metres high, visible from the A-7 motorway. It was the last project of a Bhutanese Buddhist master who died four months before it opened — and unlike almost every other stupa in the world, this one is not sealed. You can walk inside it.

How a Himalayan monument ended up here

Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche was born in Bhutan in 1918 and spent most of his life in Nepal. From the late 1980s he taught extensively in the West and built sixteen stupas across Europe and Russia in his final eleven years. The first in Spain went up in 1994 at the Karma Guen retreat centre near Vélez-Málaga, and it became the model for the rest. He took Spanish residency in 1995, and it was here that he raised the idea of the largest stupa in the Western world with Benalmádena’s then mayor, Enrique Bolín, who had seen the Vélez-Málaga stupa and provided the land. The German-based Polish architect Wojtek Kossowski, who had worked on the earlier projects, oversaw construction. Rinpoche died aged 85, four months before the inauguration on 5 October 2003, which was performed by the 14th Kunzig Shamar Rinpoche.

What the building is doing

Buddhist tradition recognises eight types of stupa, each marking an event in the Buddha’s life, and each built to precise specification. This is an Enlightenment Stupa, representing the state the Buddha reached after forty-nine days of meditation under the bodhi tree. Its five levels correspond to earth, water, fire, air and space. The base measures 25.8 metres across. From the ceiling of the interior hall upward it is entirely packed with sacred objects, and the treasure chambers — sealed permanently — hold, among much else, six thousand clay Buddha reliefs made by two of Rinpoche’s Western students.

The exception: a room inside

Stupas are normally solid, sealed monuments; there is nothing to enter. Benalmádena’s was built with a meditation hall of over a hundred square metres inside it, plus a basement used for exhibitions on Tibetan Buddhism and Himalayan culture. That makes it functionally a temple as well as a monument, and it is the reason a visit is worth making rather than just photographing from the road. It is run by a non-profit cultural association and sits on a panoramic platform with the whole coast below.

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