Four friends posed for a photograph during their 1972 holiday. More than 50 years later, they recreated the moment.

In the photo, four young women, hand in hand, smiling broadly, stroll along a coastal path. They are wearing short skirts and sandals, with a 1960s Ford Corsair in the background. It is clearly a photograph from a bygone era, but there is something about it – in the expressions on the faces, in the women’s laughter – that captures a sense of playfulness, youthfulness and adventure that is timeless and universal.

For the four women in the photo, Marion Bamforth, Sue Morris, Carol Ansbro and Mary Helliwell, it is one of their favorites. Taken more than 50 years ago during a group holiday in the seaside town of Torquay, Devon, England, the photo has since become a symbol of their decades-long friendship. Every time they see it, they are reminded of the excitement of their first trip together.

“It’s always been our memory of Torquay,” Sue Morris tells CNN Travel. “It’s iconic: that’s why I had the idea to recreate it.”

Bamforth, Morris, Ansbro and Helliwell were all 17 when the photo was taken, “by one of those itinerant photographers who used to roam the coast and take advantage of tourists like us,” Morris recalls.

It was the summer of 1972, and the four high school friends, who grew up in Halifax, northern England, were in a rented caravan on the Devon coast in southwest England. It was a week filled with laughter, late nights, flirting with boys in food shops, sunbathing, swapping clothes, sharing secrets and making memories by the sea.

The result? A pretty perfect re-creation: in the 2024 photo, Bamforth, Morris, Ansbro and Helliwell appear again, walking hand in hand and smiling.

When the friends saw the re-creation and compared it with the original, they were deeply moved.