Estepona · New Golden Mile
Another 42 apartments came to the market in Estepona this week, and on its own that is a press release. The number worth looking at is 1,400.
That is roughly how many homes are going up in the new neighbourhood north of Selwo park, on the stretch between Estepona, Marbella and Benahavís that everyone now calls the New Golden Mile. It is the largest piece of residential development happening anywhere on this coast, and since March this year most of it has been in the hands of a single company.
What has actually launched
The second phase of Australy Thera went to market on 6 August, 42 homes of two, three and four bedrooms starting at 113 square metres, according to El Español. Every unit comes with a garage and a storage room, and the terraces face the sea with the mountains behind.
The first phase was 25 homes and is half sold. Together the two make 67.
Australy is not itself a development. It is the sector, the named piece of land north of Selwo, and the homes inside it are sold as separate promotions with their own names, prices and delivery dates. Libella and Aures are the two you can buy into today, Thera is the newest, and the developer set the sector out as four in total with Adara still to come. Between them they account for around 200 homes within walking distance of each other, which is a very different proposition from 200 homes scattered across a municipality.
Residents get a Casa Club with a spa, an outdoor pool, a gym, a gastrobar and coworking space. That specification is now close to standard on the New Golden Mile rather than a reason to choose one scheme over another.
Where the New Golden Mile actually starts and ends
The name causes more confusion than it should. The New Golden Mile is not an administrative area and appears on no official map. It is a marketing term that stuck, covering the coastal strip that runs roughly from the western edge of Marbella down towards Estepona town, taking in El Paraíso, Cancelada, Selwo and everything between them.
Nobody selling here has a reason to tighten that definition. The wider it stays, the more properties can carry the name.
A property described as being on the New Golden Mile might be four hundred metres from the sand at El Paraíso, or two kilometres inland and above the motorway. The corridor covers something like twelve kilometres of coastline, and asking prices across it vary by a factor of three. Both of those properties are being marketed under the same three words.
So the question that decides the price is not whether a property sits on the New Golden Mile, but which part of it, how far from the sea, and which side of the A-7. Australy sits north of Selwo, inland, towards the Estepona end, and that is the position its pricing should be judged from rather than against anything closer to Marbella. Establishing exactly that is the first thing we do on any comparison we run for a client.
The neighbourhood behind the launch
Australy is not a standalone development. It is one piece of something considerably bigger.
It sits inside a much larger urban area, known administratively as Torrevigía and marketed as Vanian-Australy, covering 1.3 million square metres north of Selwo. More than 1,400 homes are planned across it. Alongside the housing there is an international school, sports facilities, supermarkets and leisure space, which is roughly what separates a neighbourhood from an estate.
the developer is responsible for around 900 of those homes and has already launched Vanian Views and Vanian Gardens, 296 between them. The launches on the New Golden Mile get reported one at a time, 42 here, 73 there, and nobody adds them up, which is a shame because the total is the only number that tells you what is really happening to supply.
Why one owner now builds most of it
Spain’s two largest listed housebuilders became one company on 5 March 2026, when a mandatory offer closed at 96.83% of the shares. The deal was valued at close to €950 million and lifted the combined land bank by more than 60%.
On paper that is a corporate story. On the ground it means the developer building Australy and the developer building Vanian are the same balance sheet, and that one company sets the pace, the specification and the pricing across more than 1,400 homes in a single new district of the New Golden Mile.
None of that is a criticism of the builder. It is a well run business, the product it delivers on the New Golden Mile is good, and consolidation was probably inevitable given how much of the Spanish market sat with two listed builders. It is simply a fact about supply, and buyers are entitled to know it before they are told a scheme is selling quickly.
What concentration does to price
A developer with one project has to sell it. A developer with 1,400 homes across a district does not have to sell any particular one this month.
One of them has to do a deal this quarter and the other does not, and that difference runs through everything else. When supply in an area is split between eight competing builders, they discount against each other and the buyer collects the benefit.
When it sits with one, releases can be staged, later phases can be priced upward as the neighbourhood fills, and the incentive to cut is very small. None of that is improper. It is what any sensible owner does with a large land bank. The owner of one plot has to sell it, while the owner of fourteen hundred can wait, and the waiting is what sets the price.
We advise our clients to purchase at the earliest available opportunity and it is the unit selection I would be spending my time on and not the timing of the purchase itself. With a project of this size the difference between the right aspect and the wrong one is worth more than any negotiation you might think you will win.
James Evans, Managing Partner, JUST Real Estate
The practical consequence is that waiting for the next phase here is unlikely to be rewarded with a better price. On the New Golden Mile it has generally been the reverse, and the half sold first phase at Thera is the current evidence for it.
There is a real argument the other way, and it deserves stating properly. A single developer building an entire district produces a far more coherent place than eight builders producing eight versions of one. The materials match across the streets. The landscaping is continuous rather than stopping at each boundary. You are not living beside a half finished scheme whose developer ran out of money in year two, which happened repeatedly along this coast between 2008 and 2013 and left concrete frames standing empty for a decade.
Buyers on the New Golden Mile are getting a better built neighbourhood out of the consolidation, and that is worth something real when you are choosing where to put your money. What they are unlikely to get alongside it is a bargain, and pricing a purchase here on the assumption that a discount will appear later is the one mistake worth avoiding.
What is already selling, and at what price
Libella came first, 67 homes of two and three bedrooms running from about 94 to 105 square metres, priced from €620,000. It has been delivered and only the last few remain, so anyone who wants Australy without waiting is buying there. Aures followed with 73 homes of two, three and four bedrooms from €672,000, with individual units currently listed between €762,000 and €936,000 and completion estimated for the third quarter of 2026. Thera is the newest of the three, 67 homes across two phases, and its first phase reached 50% before the second opened at all.
Those are asking prices at launch, not completed sales. No developer publishes the second number.
Set against them, new build in Estepona’s strongest pockets has already passed €7,000 per square metre, according to idealista’s news desk in January. That figure would have been read as a misprint in this municipality five years ago.
The number to watch on the New Golden Mile is not the asking price, though. It is absorption, meaning how quickly each phase actually clears. A scheme half sold before its second phase opens is telling you something real about demand. A scheme that has been ninety per cent sold for eleven months is telling you something quite different, and the marketing language for both is identical.
Estepona was the easy recommendation against Marbella because it was cheaper. Developers have concentrated in exactly the pockets where that gap was widest, and they are pricing into it. We set out where that leaves the two towns in Estepona vs Marbella, and nothing since has changed the direction. The quarterly numbers behind it sit in our Estepona market report.
The land Marbella no longer has
The reason this is happening in Estepona rather than west Marbella is unglamorous. There is almost no land left in Nueva Andalucía or on the Golden Mile at a price that supports building at volume, and there is a great deal of it north of Selwo.
Developers followed the land, as they always do. The A-7 puts the New Golden Mile about fifteen minutes from Puerto Banús and ten from Estepona town, which is why the corridor works commercially. Buyers who would once have insisted on a Marbella postcode have become noticeably relaxed about it, particularly when the alternative is a smaller apartment for the same money. The same logic pulled buyers up into Benahavís a decade ago.
The New Golden Mile is not one place, though, and treating it as one is how people end up disappointed. The stretch behind Selwo prices very differently from the parcels up towards the motorway, and a single average per square metre across the whole corridor tells you almost nothing useful.
Who is actually buying here
The buyer profile on the New Golden Mile has shifted, and it explains the specification. Ten years ago this corridor sold mainly to holiday buyers who wanted a second home within reach of Puerto Banús at a price Marbella would not offer. The coworking space in the Casa Club is not decoration. It is there because a meaningful share of purchasers now work from the property for part of the year, and that group cares about the international school and the supermarket far more than the previous one did.
That is also why the two, three and four bedroom mix matters. A holiday buyer takes two bedrooms. A family relocating takes four, and stays. For anyone weighing the New Golden Mile against the alternatives, our guide to Estepona covers the town itself, and the valuation calculator will tell you what your current property is worth if a move here is on the table.
The other Estepona, on the same maps
While Australy and Vanian go up, Estepona’s town hall has been processing licences for well over a thousand homes of vivienda de protección oficial. Fundación Vimpyca alone has applied to build 117 protected homes on municipal land at Camino de Cortes Sur.
These two things belong together even though they rarely appear in the same article. A coastal town needs to house the people who staff its restaurants, its schools and its clinics, and Estepona is building for both ends of that at once. It has run a strong budget position through the period, holding tax reductions while increasing infrastructure spending, which is the sort of administrative competence that shows up later as licences granted on time. For an off plan buyer that matters, because a predictable town hall is the difference between a delivery date that holds and one that slips.
Buying off plan at Australy
Everything at Australy is sold off plan, which on the New Golden Mile has been the better side of the trade for some years. The buyers who committed early at Libella and Aures bought at prices that no longer exist, and they did it with a bank guarantee on every instalment, which is a legal requirement in Spain and the reason off plan here carries far less risk than the phrase suggests to anyone arriving from another market. Our off plan guide sets out exactly what the contract should contain, and the rest of the coast’s current launches sit on our developments page.
There are two details worth settling early, and we can help you with both. Knowing precisely which phase you are entering tells you where you sit in the pricing sequence, because Libella, Aures and Thera are at different stages and the earlier ones have already moved. Choosing between units within a phase is where most of the value is won or lost.
The other is the community fee, which matters more than usual on a scheme with a spa, a gym and a gastrobar to run. Nobody can give you an exact figure before the community is formally constituted and the gardening and maintenance contracts go out to tender. What we can do is set it against what comparable schemes in Estepona actually charge, using fee records we have been building for years, which gets you close enough to budget properly.
Libella or Aures
Two of the Australy promotions are open to buyers today and they suit different people. Libella is delivered, so you can walk through it and move in, with only the last homes left from €620,000. Aures completes around the third quarter of 2026 and starts at €672,000, which gives you choice of unit and time to plan.
Tell us which of the two fits and we will send the plans, the current availability and an honest view on which units are worth having.
Australy and the New Golden Mile, answered
Is Australy a development or an area?
Australy is the sector, a named piece of land north of Selwo park in Estepona, not a single development. The homes within it are sold as separate promotions, each with its own name, prices and delivery date. Libella and Aures are the two on the market, Thera launched in August 2026 and a fourth, Adara, is still to come.
How many homes are being built at Australy in Estepona?
Around 200 across the sector. Libella accounts for 67, Aures for 73 and Thera for 67, with Adara still to come. Australy in turn sits inside the wider Vanian-Australy neighbourhood, which is planned for more than 1,400 homes across 1.3 million square metres.
What is the difference between Australy Libella and Australy Aures?
Libella came first and has been delivered, 67 homes of two and three bedrooms between roughly 94 and 105 square metres, from €620,000, with only the last few left and immediate occupation. Aures is 73 homes of two, three and four bedrooms from €672,000, completing around the third quarter of 2026, so it suits a buyer who can wait. Both share the Australy Casa Club. Current availability and plans for both are on our Australy page.
Is Australy one development or several?
Several. Australy is the sector, the named parcel of land, and there are four separate promotions being built inside it, each with its own name, price list and delivery date. That is why you will see different figures quoted for what looks like the same place. Ask us and we will tell you which promotion suits what you are after and what is still available in each.
Where exactly is Australy on the New Golden Mile?
North of Selwo park, inland, towards the Estepona end of the New Golden Mile and inside the triangle formed by Estepona, Marbella and Benahavís. The A-7 puts it roughly fifteen minutes from Puerto Banús and ten from Estepona town, with the beach about three minutes away by car.
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Research enquiries:
James Evans — Managing Partner
📞 +34 643 390 376 | ✉️ james@justrealestate.es
Sales enquiries:
Alina Nouaimeh — Partner
📞 +34 600 689 749 | ✉️ alina@justrealestate.es
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