Property for Sale in Guadalmina

How it came to be

A farm, then a golf course, and the houses last of all

The oldest things here are on the beach. About a kilometre east of the river mouth, on the sand at Guadalmina Baja, stand the Roman baths of Las Bóvedas, an octagonal hall of the late Empire that still carries part of its vault and both its storeys, with fish salting tanks around it and a sixteenth century watchtower above. Five hundred metres north east, among the eucalyptus, is the Vega del Mar basilica, three naves with an apse at each end and a font cut from a single stone, with a burial ground of some two hundred graves around it. The remains are big enough that the Junta’s own record treats them as a possible Roman town rather than a villa. Both sites were listed before any of this was built: the basilica in 1931 and the baths in 1936.

For everything after that the story starts in 1933, when Norberto Goizueta Díaz bought the Hacienda Guadalmina from the sugar company that had been breaking up San Pedro’s old agricultural colony since 1910. He got four hundred hectares of irrigated land, running from the Cancelada reservoir down to the sea and from the Guadalmina river across to the arroyo del Chopo. Those two watercourses are still the edges of the neighbourhood today. He built a cortijo and a long low house on the shoreline in a Californian colonial idiom, with a library of forty thousand volumes and a fifteenth century well carried off from the Seville exposition of 1929, and he farmed maize and sugar cane on the rest of it for twenty years.

In the late fifties he sent for Javier Arana, the Basque architect whose Spanish courses have a monograph of their own, and the letter he wrote him is the most useful document in this guide. The site, he said, was bounded by the Mediterranean to the south and the estate to the north, and what he wanted was to build houses inside the golf, in the manner of Chiberta and the best courses in Los Angeles, sold finished on very little land but with the course itself as their park. That sentence is the origin of an idea that has since been built the length of this coast, and it was written here first.

Arana’s nine holes opened in 1959. The first tee stood beside the Hotel Guadalmina on the beach, a par three that was a tee, a green and nothing but sand in between, and the round was played twice round to a par of seventy four. There was a par six on it called Tipperary. A second nine followed in the sixties, laid out on the northern part of the estate beside the river, and the plan sent to Arana for it put seven of the new holes in a circle so that houses could be sold both inside and outside the ring. Nobody has renumbered them since; today’s sixth to fourteenth are Arana’s original nine.

The rest arrived in order. A second course, the North, was cut into the higher ground in the seventies by Folco Nardi, an Italian cavalry colonel who had worked as Goizueta’s foreman and greenkeeper, and it is shaped by the arroyo del Chopo, which crosses five of its holes. A clubhouse went up to a design by Luis Gutiérrez Soto, the Madrid architect of Barajas airport, who was elected to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando the year before the golf opened. The South Course was rebuilt in 2002 with the Arana routing left alone. The order of events is still legible on the ground, and it is the reason the houses sit where they sit.