Area guide · Marbella, Málaga
A Guide to Marbella
Marbella is not one market. It is a mountain, a town, a golf valley and twenty seven kilometres of coast, and which of them you buy in changes the price, the outlook and the planning position more than anything on the specification sheet. This is how the municipality is actually laid out.
Marbella, 2026 to date
this year
pending the new PGOM
The setting
A town built in the shelter of a mountain
The limestone wall behind Marbella is not scenery. La Concha and the Sierra Blanca ridge stand between the town and the weather coming off the meseta, and they hold the warm air against the shore, which is why the subtropical planting that struggles thirty kilometres inland grows here without protection and why Marbella runs noticeably milder in January than its latitude suggests.
That same wall caps the town. Buildable hillside runs out where the protected land begins, so the supply of elevated plots is genuinely finite rather than merely scarce for now. It is the single fact that explains why the slopes above the Golden Mile have held their premium through every cycle since they were laid out.
The coast helps too. Along this stretch the shoreline runs roughly east to west rather than north to south, so the whole seafront faces the sun for the length of the day. It also means the word south facing does very little work in a Marbella listing, since almost everything is, and the orientation worth asking about is whether the terrace catches the afternoon or loses it behind a ridge.
Practically, the town sits about forty minutes from Málaga airport on the A7 and rather less than that from Gibraltar in the other direction, which is why the buyer profile here has always been international rather than regional.
The Nueva Andalucía valley, with the courses occupying the valley floor and the villas ranged around them.
Where to live in Marbella
A guide to Marbella neighbourhood by neighbourhood
Grouped by the postcode districts the official price data is actually published against, so the geography and the figures line up rather than pulling in different directions.
Postcode district 29602
The Golden Mile and the hillside above it
The strip running west from Marbella town to Puerto Banús, and the slopes rising behind it. On official deed prices this is the most expensive postcode district in the whole of Málaga province.
Golden Mile
Marbella Club opened here in 1954 and Puente Romano followed, so the residential plots were laid out around two hotels rather than along a seafront road. That is why the gardens are mature, the streets are quiet and the density never climbed.
Read the Golden Mile guidePuente Romano
A resort rather than a single development. The homes sit inside the hotel’s own grounds, so the tennis club, the beach club and the restaurants are all on the doorstep and all under one management.
Read the Puente Romano guideNagüeles
Two markets sharing one name. Arroyo de las Piedras holds around 700 apartments built between 1990 and 2002, priced far below the villas further up the same road. The Ermita de San Bernabé, dedicated to Marbella’s patron saint, sits at the top of it in the Parque de Nagüeles.
Read the Nagüeles guideSierra Blanca
Planned for around 2,000 homes, and fewer than 500 were built. The plot sizes, the width of the roads and the space between the houses all follow from that single decision. Villas throughout, with Meisho Hills the one exception.
Read the Sierra Blanca guideCascada de Camoján
Named for a cascade that runs on the arroyo below La Concha and fills after rain. The mountain above the enclave is a protected natural park, so the boundary at the top of it is permanent rather than pending.
Read the Cascada de Camoján guidePostcode district 29660
The golf valley behind Puerto Banús
The widest valley on this stretch of coast, and the busiest part of Marbella by volume: 1,059 homes signed before a notary here this year, more than any other district in the municipality.
Nueva Andalucía
Three golf courses occupy the floor of the valley, which is why the villas ringing it look out over open ground instead of over each other. Puerto Banús sits at the bottom of the same valley, so the marina is a few minutes down the hill.
Read the Nueva Andalucía guidePostcode district 29604
Marbella East
Beachside living east of the town, where the coast opens out and the plots get bigger. The average deed here is €3,970 per square metre, and a good part of that gap to the Golden Mile is a different mix of homes rather than a different quality of address.
Los Monteros
Laid out around the hotel of the same name, with its beach club on the sand rather than across a road from it. Far enough east that the coast road stops being the spine of the neighbourhood and the beach starts being it.
Read the Los Monteros guideBordering Marbella, in Benahavís
Over the municipal line
Two addresses buyers almost always name in the same breath as Marbella, and reach through Marbella, but which sit in the neighbouring municipality of Benahavís. That matters, because the planning framework, the town hall and the local taxes are all different.
La Zagaleta
The most private of the gated estates in the Golden Triangle, inland and high, with its own golf. So few homes change hands in a year that a single sale visibly moves the average price for the whole municipality.
Read the La Zagaleta guideLa Quinta
The golf valley above Nueva Andalucía, and high enough that the sea view clears everything between it and the water rather than threading between it.
Read the La Quinta guideThese are the neighbourhoods with a full guide written so far. Marbella has a good many more, and the town centre, San Pedro de Alcántara, Elviria and Las Chapas among others are in the queue. New guides are added regularly, so it is worth coming back rather than assuming an absence here means an absence of stock.
Official figures
What Marbella actually sells for
Every figure below is a deed price, meaning the amount declared in front of a notary when the sale completed. It is the closest thing to an achieved price that exists in the public record.
all Marbella sales
in 2026 to date
per sale
of the home sold
The number worth holding on to is the last one. The average Marbella home that changed hands this year measured 169 square metres, which is an apartment or a small townhouse rather than the villa the town is known for. Marbella sells a great many ordinary homes alongside the extraordinary ones, and any average across the whole municipality is describing the former far more than the latter.
That is also why deed prices and advertised asking prices should never be set side by side as though they were two readings of the same thing. They are drawn from different populations of property, so the gap between them measures the difference in what is being counted at least as much as it measures any room to negotiate. We keep the two apart everywhere on this site, and we would encourage you to be sceptical of anyone who does not.
- New build€5,550465 sales
- Resale€4,5553,572 sales
- Houses€4,924776 sales
- Apartments€4,4973,261 sales
Price per square metre by segment. New build carries a premium of just under a thousand euros a square metre over resale, though it accounts for roughly one sale in nine.
| District | What it covers | Per m² | Avg size | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29602 | Golden Mile, Sierra Blanca, Nagüeles, Puente Romano, Camoján | €5,475 | 195 m² | 622 |
| 29660 | Nueva Andalucía and Puerto Banús | €4,739 | 175 m² | 1,059 |
| 29603 | Las Albarizas and the ground behind the town | €4,726 | 151 m² | 405 |
| 29670 | San Pedro de Alcántara | €4,358 | 156 m² | 564 |
| 29601 | Marbella old town and centre | €4,347 | 136 m² | 586 |
| 29604 | Marbella East, Los Monteros to Elviria | €3,970 | 169 m² | 546 |
Source: Consejo General del Notariado, deed prices, 2026 year to date, read on 13 August 2026. Postcode districts are matched to their municipality by the publisher’s own boundaries, and the areas each one covers were checked against the Catastro street register rather than inferred. District 29602 is the highest priced postcode in the province of Málaga, ahead of central Málaga city. Postcode boundaries and neighbourhood boundaries are not the same thing, so treat the coverage column as an orientation rather than a definition.
Twenty one years
What has actually happened to Marbella prices
Marbella, appraised value per square metre, every quarter from 2005 to the first quarter of 2026.
This is not the same measure as the deed prices above, and the difference is worth understanding before reading anything into it. Appraised value is what a qualified valuer certifies a home is worth when a bank is deciding how much to lend against it. It sits below deed prices here, because a valuer is pricing the lender’s security rather than recording what a buyer proved willing to pay. The two are never averaged and never compared directly. What this series gives that the deed register cannot is direction over time, because it runs back to 2005 while the notarial figures carry no history at all.
Marbella peaked at €2,900 per square metre in the last quarter of 2007, then gave up just over a third of that across the following eight years, bottoming out at €1,898 in early 2015. It took until the first quarter of 2023, more than fifteen years after the peak, to climb back above the old high. It now stands half as much again above that 2007 level, and the most recent reading of €4,333 is the highest in the twenty one years the series covers. That last quarter carries the publisher’s provisional mark, and revisions on this table have generally moved upward rather than down.
Volume tells a calmer story than the price line does. The busiest year the municipality has on record was 2022, at 5,514 registered transactions. The three years since have clustered close to 4,500, and 2025 closed at 4,399, the quietest of them. That is still a fifth above the 3,681 Marbella registered in 2019. What reads as a slowdown against 2022 is a return to a level that would have looked like a very good year at any point before the pandemic.
- 20225,514the record year
- 20234,517
- 20244,743
- 20254,399
Registered transactions by municipality, complete calendar years.
Source: Ministerio de Transportes, boletín estadístico, re-pulled on 14 August 2026. Price per square metre is on an appraised value basis, covering 85 quarters from the first quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2026, and is not comparable with the deed prices above. Transaction counts are registered sales by municipality; the annual figures shown are complete calendar years, and the first quarter of 2026 carries the publisher’s provisional mark so it is excluded from them.
From our own records
What is standing on the market, and what it costs to hold
in Marbella
are homes
land among them
this covers
No official body publishes what is available to buy, only what has already sold, so this part comes from our own intelligence. Through our network memberships we have access to every property that is available on this coast, which means we know both what is genuinely on the market and where the same home is being advertised more than once. Counted as advertisements, Marbella would look like close to seven thousand properties for sale. The real number is 3,190.
That figure should be accurate to within about five to ten per cent, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than burying. A small number of apartments within the same development can look so alike on paper, the same size, the same layout, the same asking price, that they cannot always be recognised as the same home when the sources are brought together. Where that happens one apartment is counted twice, so the true figure is more likely to sit a little below the number above than above it.
What it counts is not our own list of instructions. It covers the stock of more than 580 agencies, and we are one of the listing agents on 323 of those properties. Roughly nine in every ten are somebody else’s mandate, and we are able to represent a buyer on any of them. The agent holding the mandate works for the seller and is paid to achieve the highest price the market will bear, which is their job and they should do it well. Having someone on the other side of that table only changes the result if they arrive with better information than the person across it. Knowing what a district actually achieved per square metre, rather than what it is advertising, and knowing what a given home will cost to run once the keys change hands, is the difference between an offer that is a guess and one that is an argument. That is why we compile these figures ourselves rather than repeating a portal’s.
This is our own work rather than a public register, so treat it as a detailed view rather than a complete one, and the stock we see leans larger and dearer than Marbella as a whole.
- Villas88033% of homes
- Apartments1,28948% of homes
- Townhouses50119% of homes
- Plots of land260building land
- Commercial260and other
That shape explains a figure further up this page. Villas and townhouses together are a little over half of the homes on offer. Among the homes that completed and were signed before a notary this year, houses accounted for a little under a fifth. Some of that gap is real, because a villa takes longer to find its buyer than an apartment does and unsold stock therefore accumulates them. Some of it is the shape of what reaches the open market rather than the shape of Marbella. Both halves are worth knowing.
The 260 plots are worth a line of their own, because they are the part of the market that decides what Marbella looks like in five years. Building land inside the municipality is finite, the hillside runs out where the protected ground begins, and what is standing here today is most of what a buyer wanting to build rather than buy can realistically choose from.
The same pattern runs through size. The average home on the market measures 345 square metres. The average home that completed measured 169. Neither figure is wrong and the distance between them is not a discount, they are averages over two different populations, which is why we never set an asking price and a deed price beside each other as though one were a negotiation off the other.
Running costs are the part nobody advertises, and on this coast they are not trivial. Set out by type they run in opposite directions, which is not what most buyers expect. The tax bill rises with the land underneath, so a villa pays roughly twice the IBI of an apartment. The community charge rises with everything that is shared, the gardens, the pool, the lifts and the security, so an apartment pays close to twice the villa. A villa is dear to own and cheap to belong to, and an apartment is the other way round.
- Villa IBI€2,258n=467
- Townhouse IBI€1,125n=323
- Apartment IBI€1,200n=806
- Villa community€1,956n=350
- Townhouse community€2,928n=352
- Apartment community€3,600n=905
- All homes, together€4,626IBI plus community
Median annual figures in euros. Sample sizes differ because not every listing publishes a running cost.
This page shows one measure of one market. We keep records like these on very nearly everything a buyer eventually needs to ask about, from what a particular development charges in community fees, to how long its units take to sell, to what a given plot is actually permitted to carry. Almost none of it is published anywhere, which is precisely why we started building it years ago and why we are still building it. It is also the honest answer to why you would want us on your side of a negotiation rather than on the other side of it.
From our own intelligence, compiled across our development records, resale data and wider market research, for the week of 30 July 2026. Covering Marbella including San Pedro de Alcántara: 3,190 properties on the market, of which 2,670 are homes, 260 are plots of land and 260 are commercial or other. Villas include detached houses; townhouses include terraced and semi-detached; apartments include penthouses, duplexes and studios. Accurate to within roughly five to ten per cent for the reason given above. Stock is held by more than 580 agencies; we are a listing agent on 323, and every other property belongs to the agency that listed it and is counted here for our own market analysis only. Running costs are medians of the annual figures published against those properties, and sample sizes differ by field because not every listing publishes one. Every price in this set is an asking price, and a listing leaving the market is not evidence of a sale, so nothing here is presented as a transaction figure.
Deed prices and price trend as of 14 August 2026 · supply and running costs from the week of 30 July 2026 · reviewed each quarter
Planning
The plan the town is still waiting on
Marbella’s 2010 general plan was annulled in 2015, which left the municipality governed by a framework drawn up in 1986. Its replacement, the PGOM, received two favourable regional reports and provisional approval from the council on 29 July 2026, but it still needs definitive approval from the Junta de Andalucía and publication in BOJA, the official gazette of the Junta de Andalucía, before it governs anything.
Until that happens, two documents describe the same piece of ground and only the older one has legal force. For most buyers of a finished, licensed home this changes very little. For anyone buying land, buying to extend, or buying something whose paperwork is less than complete, it is the difference between a development right and an expectation, and it is worth establishing which one you are paying for before you commit.
A villa under construction in Marbella. Which plan governs the plot decides what may be built on it.
Common questions
Questions we are asked about Marbella
Which part of Marbella should I live in?
It depends far more on how you intend to use the house than on budget. If you want to walk to a beach club and a restaurant, the Golden Mile and Puente Romano are laid out for exactly that. If you want a large plot, privacy and a view, the hillside above the Golden Mile, meaning Sierra Blanca, Nagüeles and Cascada de Camoján, is where the space is. If you want golf on the doorstep and a valley rather than a slope, Nueva Andalucía. And if you want the beach itself rather than a view of it, Marbella East around Los Monteros.
Is Puerto Banús part of Marbella?
Yes. Puerto Banús is a marina and the district around it, and it sits within the municipality of Marbella, at the seaward end of the Nueva Andalucía valley. It shares postcode 29660 with Nueva Andalucía, and the two are usually treated as one market.
Is San Pedro de Alcántara part of Marbella?
Yes. San Pedro de Alcántara is a district of the municipality of Marbella, west of Puerto Banús, with its own town centre and its own character. It has postcode 29670, and homes there signed at an average of 4,358 euros per square metre in 2026 to date.
Which is the most expensive part of Marbella?
Postcode district 29602, which covers the Golden Mile and the hillside above it including Sierra Blanca, Nagüeles, Puente Romano and Cascada de Camoján. Homes there were signed before a notary at an average of 5,475 euros per square metre in 2026 to date. That is the highest figure of any postcode district in the province of Málaga, ahead of central Málaga city.
How much does property in Marbella cost per square metre?
Across the whole municipality, homes sold in 2026 to date were signed before a notary at an average of 4,665 euros per square metre, on an average size of 169 square metres. New build signed at 5,550 euros per square metre and resale at 4,555. These are deed prices, meaning what was declared at signing, so they are not the same thing as the asking prices you see advertised and the two should never be compared directly.
Are La Zagaleta and La Quinta in Marbella?
No. Both sit in the neighbouring municipality of Benahavís, even though they are usually reached through Marbella and are almost always discussed alongside it. The distinction is practical rather than pedantic: a different town hall issues the licences, a different planning framework applies, and the local taxes are set separately.
How many properties are for sale in Marbella?
About 3,190, on our own count for the week of 30 July 2026, covering Marbella and San Pedro de Alcántara. No official body publishes what is available to buy, so this comes from our own intelligence. Counted as advertisements it would look like nearly seven thousand, because the same home is often advertised in more than one place. Of the 3,190, some 2,670 are homes, made up of 880 villas, 1,289 apartments and 501 townhouses, alongside 260 plots of building land and 260 commercial or other units. Expect it to be accurate to within roughly five to ten per cent: apartments within the same development can look near identical on paper and are not always recognised as the same home when the sources are brought together, so the true figure may run slightly lower. It is also standing stock rather than a measure of how much is selling, and the two should not be read against each other.
What does it cost to run a property in Marbella?
A little over 4,600 euros a year for a typical home, before insurance, utilities or repairs. The two components run in opposite directions by property type, which surprises most buyers. IBI, the local property tax, follows the land underneath: a villa pays a median of 2,258 euros, a townhouse 1,125 and an apartment 1,200. The community charge follows what is shared: an apartment pays a median of 3,600 euros, a townhouse 2,928 and a villa 1,956. So a villa is dear to own and cheap to belong to, and an apartment is the other way round. These figures come from our own intelligence, for the week of 30 July 2026, and not every listing publishes a running cost, so each is a median of those that do.
Is the new Marbella PGOM in force?
Not yet. As at August 2026 the plan had received two favourable regional reports and provisional approval from Marbella’s council on 29 July 2026, but it still requires definitive approval by the Junta de Andalucía and publication in BOJA. Until that happens the 1986 general plan remains the framework in force.
Talk to us
Tell us how you want to live, and we will tell you where that is
Most people arrive with an area already in mind and leave having bought somewhere else, because the thing they actually wanted turned out to be two valleys along. Describe what the days should look like and we will send you the parts of Marbella that deliver it, with the honest drawbacks of each.
A person reads this and a person replies, usually the same day. No automated drip, no passing your details to another agency, and no obligation to view anything.
