David Cantero and the real savings of travelling by motorhome at 65

Motorhome versus hotel: the maths doesn't always add up

David Cantero has spent more than four decades in front of a camera. At 65, the Madrid-born presenter — a familiar face from news programmes on TVE and Mediaset — has made the motorhome his holiday refuge: crossing the Pyrenees, sleeping wherever possible and skipping the hotel. He tells it as a discovery. Others tell it as a tin can on wheels. The underlying question is whether that is freedom or an elegant way of tightening one's belt.

The calculation that dismantles the motorhome savings

The heart of the matter is arithmetic: how many hotel nights does the price of a 2007 motorhome plus its first-year servicing and maintenance cover? Spoken out loud, the answer is nothing to boast about. An old motorhome is not just the purchase: it's the ITV roadworthiness test, the engine, the tyres, every breakdown on the road. Those who defend the hotel aren't talking about luxury, they're talking about arithmetic.

On the other side sits a reasonable argument: judging a leisure vehicle by cost per night is reductive, and waking up in the place you chose is not the same as sleeping in a hotel room. The problem is that this reasoning, taken to its extreme, ends up justifying any expense whatsoever.

«Motorhome snobbery»: the label that sums up the clash

That's where the concept that has ended up naming the whole affair comes from. «Motorhome snobbery» — literally «caravan racism» — refers, in its most literal formulation, to the disdainful look directed at anyone who holidays in a motorhome and gives the hotel a miss. The label is over the top — comparing this to real racism grates — but it captures a genuine tension: the rejection of a lifestyle that doesn't fit the idea of holiday success.

Beneath it lies a broader debate about car culture in Spain. Here, the argument goes, the car splits in two: the runabout you take to work and the status symbol — the black, grey and white SUVs parked outside the school gates. The idea of the vehicle as a leisure tool, perfectly normal in other countries, here sounds outright precarious.

A TV veteran in the crosshairs

That the protagonist is a familiar face adds the missing ingredient. Cantero has forty years of television behind him and a recent controversial chapter: his critics take issue with his role during the vaccination campaign, when, they claim, he was particularly forceful on screen. From there to a personal settling of scores is a short step, and social media has taken it without restraint.

What's striking is not that a 65-year-old presenter travels by motorhome. What's striking is that this is read as a betrayal of the persona, as if a television salary obliged you to spend it on five-star hotels.

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The whole family crammed into six square metres and calling it freedom. That's the image that lingers. And, curiously, nobody has yet produced the actual bill for the first year of motorhome ownership. That number, the one that would settle the argument, is still missing.