1984 Costa Del Sol Classic 1984 Costa Del Sol Classic The 1984 Costa Del Sol Classic was a professional invitational snooker tournament which took place in August 1984. The tournament was held at the Las Palmeras Hotel in Fuengirola, Spain, and featured 12 professional players. The four qualifying matches were played under a best-of-five frames format, as were the quarter-finals and semi-finals, and the final best of nine. Dennis Taylor won the event, beating Mike Hallett 5–2 in the final, which was twenty-five-year old Hallett's first as a professional. Four players participated in qualifying for the quarter-finals, to which Tony Knowles, Taylor, Joe Johnson and
Costa del Sol international celebrities such as Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Brigitte Bardot and Frank Sinatra. The Hotel la Roca had opened in 1942, with the Hotel Pez Espada opening in 1959. The Costa del Sol experienced an explosive demographic and economic expansion with the boom in tourism between 1959 and 1974. The name "Costa del Sol" was a brand created specifically to market the Mediterranean coastline of Málaga province to foreign vacationers. Historically the provincial population had lived in the fishing villages, and in the "white" villages (pueblos blancos) a short distance inland in the mountains running down