At 7:45 one July morning, Nick Hughes was eating breakfast at his hotel on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, when he noticed something odd. Guests were starting to line up behind a barrier near the pool.
They were not waiting for food or a bus. They were waiting for sunbeds.
Over the next hour, the line kept growing. Hughes, a father of two from North Wales, guessed that more than 100 people of all ages had joined it. Some had been standing there for about an hour and 15 minutes.
"Before the barrier was opened, everyone seemed very relaxed and friendly," he said. "People were chatting, laughing and generally behaving as you would expect on holiday."
At 9 a.m., hotel staff moved the barrier away. "The moment the barrier came down, everything changed," Hughes said. "What had been a calm queue suddenly became a sprint." People rushed in all directions and weaved around one another to get ahead. Some even threw their towels onto sunbeds before they had reached them.
Hughes had often heard friends and family talk about the famous sunbed race at holiday hotels, but he had never seen one with his own eyes. He took out his phone and started filming, because he thought it was funny.
The scene was even stranger because the hotel had signs asking guests not to save sunbeds. There were also plenty of sunbeds around the hotel. People were not fighting because there were too few. They were competing for the best spots.
Hughes thinks hotels could end the race by giving each guest a sunbed when they check in, or by letting them book one on an app. "A better system would remove the stress," he said.
His own family did not join in. They finished their breakfast and then went to a bigger pool in another part of the hotel, which opened later. "While so many people were queuing and rushing for beds," he said, "we were able to enjoy a stress-free start to the day and still get exactly what we needed."
Hughes later shared his clip online, and some viewers enjoyed the show as much as he did. One wrote: "This was the highlight of our holiday. We sat at the window for breakfast just so we could watch."