But it is increasingly known as a playground for the rich, with the world's highest percentage of millionaires, and its glitzy night life.
Like Greece, Spain has been developed as a playground for northern Europeans who relieved their long winters and cloudy summers with cheap flights to the Costas, sun, booze and golf.
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We pretty much think of any store with aisles of gadgets as a playground, but these stores feature home-like "vignette" settings that demonstrate how the gear will fit into your lifestyle.
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It makes sense for wealthy drivers to live in Monaco -- after all, the independent state on the French Riviera has thrived on its reputation as a playground for the rich and famous since the late 1800s.
Children treated the fairways as a vast playground, the bunkers as makeshift forts.
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The web is a marketplace as well as a library and a playground.
The festival has also contributed to Heilonjiang's growing reputation as a winter sports playground.
Indeed, Russia's elite are using London as something of a playground, a place where they can talk more freely about their home country and enjoy their newfound wealth.
We would ask them really to stay away from the railway as it is not a playground.
Then there's the 38-seat theater, a whizbang Web site and an aviation-themed children's playground, as well as a gift shop.
What had previously been a woman's world is vastly becoming a playground for men as well.
Borrego Ranch started life in 1937 as the Desert Lodge and quickly became a winter playground for wealthy coast-dwellers.
The visitor to Tasmania's wild west will find a vast outdoor playground: multiday hikes, such as the Overland Track, to tackle and river rafting on the incredible Franklin River.
"It is almost as if Nick Clegg and David Cameron are like a pair of playground bullies - let's push around those least able to defend themselves, " she told peers.
Search and rescue teams continued their desperate efforts at Plaza Towers Elementary, where the storm ripped off the school's roof, knocked down walls and turned the playground into a mass of twisted plastic and metal as students and teachers huddled in hallways and bathrooms.
That same afternoon, as I stood watching my seven year-old daughter at the playground while playing a mental game with myself by seeing how long I could go without checking my Blackberry, it occurred to me that everything you need to know about being a successful adult you learn at the playground.
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Yet as well as being a shambles, the CDS market now stands accused of being a speculator's playground.
Bullying was defined as repeated instances over a six-month period, rather than just one-off conflicts in the playground.
Playground accidents, for example, often are the result of a sequence of events, such as climbing too high on a jungle gym.
They focus instead on the island's 100km (60 miles) of sandy, mostly undeveloped, shoreline, hoping it has the same pulling power as the beaches of Hainan, a (much larger) tropical island off the southern coast that has become the playground of China's rich.
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