Joshua Parfitt
SHE is the local girl who’s zoomed into Lewis Hamilton’s affections.
Yet, just four years ago Cindy Kimberly was babysitting for €4 an hour to help single-mum Candi make ends meet on the Costa Blanca, the Olive Press can reveal.
The supermodel – who is Spain’s most followed woman on Instagram – grew up in an impecunious single-parent household in downtown Denia.
Yet, last month she was living it up in London – believed to be with multi-millionaire Hamilton – and all eyes were on the motor racing ace last weekend at the Barcelona grand prix as he visited Cindy’s current city.
She was first linked to the British driver after being seen disembarking from his private jet in Barcelona’s El Prat airport in February.
Tongues started wagging when a photograph was later published of Cindy holding Hamilton’s arm and staring into his eyes when leaving the airport.
While Cindy has played down the rumours, claiming they are ‘just friends’, she did not rule out a relationship in the future.
She said: “My heart is currently 70% occupied with my cats and my mother, but all friendships are open to love.”
The contrast from her current lifestyle – flying private jets around the world with models and stars – could not be further from her life as a teenager on the Costa Blanca.
The Olive Press has discovered that Cindy – real name Cindy Kimberly Rubira Adsuar – was something of an ‘ugly duckling’ who spent her time drafting ‘pretend messages’ to idols, including Justin Bieber.
A friend revealed that Cindy and her mother suffered ‘financial troubles’, forcing her to scrape a living as a babysitter earning just €4 an hour while attending Maria Ibars secondary school in Denia.
The friend said Cindy disliked school, instead indulging her passions in the online world of fashion.
“She spent hours studying makeup tutorials and it was her life-long dream to be a model someday,” the friend told the Olive Press.
And, incredibly, that literally happened when in December 2015, at the age of 17, Cindy’s lifelong hero Justin Bieber out of the blue published a sultry picture of the amateur model asking his 47.5 millions ‘OMG who is this??’
The next day, she had hit superstardom.
Spanish news networks descended on Denia, firstly to her school and secondly her home, but, Cindy ‘panicked’ and hid from the cameras.
In a remarkable rags-to-riches turnaround, her Instagram account exploded to half a million followers within a week, which led to a lucrative modelling contract from Uno Models in Barcelona.
Within a matter of weeks Cindy and her mother had moved to the Catalan city and have lived there ever since.
“It’s absolutely incredible what has happened to her,” former hairdresser Tito Merchito, from Peluqueria Venus, in Denia, told the Olive Press.
“She was just a normal girl like anyone else, nothing special, except she had these drop-dead gorgeous looks like Angelina Jolie.”
He continued that things started to change when she started realising how to exploit her film star looks.
“She started putting on these crazy clothes, like full army gear, or extravagant heels, and all the men in Denia would stare open-mouthed in the streets.”
The breakthrough also helped her mother, Candi Rubira Adsuar, who up until then had run a bar in Villajoyosa working long hours to bring up her only child.
The barmaid, from Crevillente, who broke up with Cindy’s Dutch-Indonesian father when their daughter was only three, has been helping take care of her career.
“Denia is a small town only really known for bull-running and red prawns. That is, until we started making it famous for modelling as well,” the friend said.
