This project is a two case study that combines historical research with ethnography to show how European integration was experienced through changes in the built environment in two successive peripheries of the European Union: Southern and, later, Eastern Europe. During the 1980s on the coasts of post-Franco Spain, swaths of homes and hotels numbering in the millions were created for tourism using foreign capital and infrastructure subsidised by EU regional development grants. These new sprawling coastal strips took advantage of European integration policies to attract visitors, homebuyers, and investors. By the mid-1990s, this urbanisation process proved so successful it was dubbed ‘the Spanish Model’ and became a development strategy for other emerging European regions: most notably newly-democratic Eastern Europe. I examine the transfer of this model using the case of Bulgaria’s Black Sea, which rapidly became a low cost destination in the 1990s as the country attempted to discard the social, aesthetic, and economic effects of socialism. European cohesion, through open borders for trade and travel, was meant to weaken nationalism and create a new sense of social Europe but the environmental and social costs of this form of development have become more apparent after the 2008 financial crisis.