Area guide · The villa hillside between two golf courses
La Alquería
The villa hillside between two golf courses, still carrying the Andalusí word for a farmstead. What the official register calls it, and what it costs to live there today.
in La Alquería today
for a villa here
at the foot of the hill
your own town hall
The place
A hillside of houses between two golf grounds it does not own
La Alquería is the hillside in Benahavís between the Atalaya golf courses at its foot and the nine holes of El Higueral on its northern edge, above Cancelada and El Paraíso, with the sea in front of it and the Serranía de Ronda behind. You reach it off the road that climbs to Benahavís village, and the village, your own town hall, is about nine minutes up that road.
The name is older than anything built on it. An alquería was the farmstead hamlet of al-Andalus, a cluster of houses working the land around them, and this ground answered to that description into living memory. Today the hillside is given over to villas almost entirely, which makes it the least mixed of the golf addresses in its municipality.
This guide sets out how the hillside came to be, what the official register actually calls it, what living here is like, and what the numbers say, including the running costs that no official body publishes and that we hold ourselves.
A terrace on the hillside, looking across to the villas stepping up the slope opposite. This is what most of La Alquería looks at.
Where exactly it is
Between Atalaya and El Higueral
The hillside read the way it is driven, up from the coast towards Benahavís village, with the Atalaya courses at the foot of the frame and the ground climbing north from there. Los Flamingos is the next slope west, and the municipal line with Estepona runs along the foot of the hill.
- 1La AlqueríaThe hillside itself, between the two golf grounds
- 2Atalaya GolfThe 1968 Old Course and 1990 New Course at the foot of the hill
- 3El ParaísoThe older golf neighbourhood south west, over the Estepona line
- 4CanceladaThe working village on the coast road below
- 5Los FlamingosThree courses in one resort, the next slope west
- 6Benahavís villageYour own town hall, about nine minutes up the road
Orthophoto PNOA © Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España. Rotated so the area reads across the frame; the north mark keeps it honest. Pins mark the centre of each place, not a boundary.
There was nothing here
A farmstead hillside, then fairways, then villas
The same frame of hillside, flown twice, seventy years apart. In 1956 it is the farmland the name always described. The fairways arrive from 1968 and the villas fill the ground between the two courses last.
Nothing was added to these frames and nothing was moved. All that changes is how much of the hillside between the two courses is spoken for. Historic and current imagery © Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España, both rendered through one frame at one scale.
How it came to be
A farm word on the map, and golf at both ends
Alquería is one of the plainest Andalusí words left on any Spanish map. It comes from the Arabic qarya, a more or less numerous group of houses, and the alquerías were the farmstead hamlets that spread the population of al-Andalus across its countryside: a main house, often a small watchtower, a patio, and the ovens, granaries and mills of a working farm. Benahavís keeps Andalusí names all over its territory, and this hillside carries the one that simply means the farm itself.
For centuries that is what the ground was, and the 1956 aerial flight still shows it: field boundaries running down towards the coast. The change began at the foot of the hill in 1968, when the Old Course at Atalaya opened to a design by Bernhard von Limburger, a German architect responsible for seventy four courses across Europe, of which this is the only one in Spain. The club’s own record is careful to say it was established first and foremost as a golf club rather than a property venture, and for two decades the golf sat at the bottom of a hillside that stayed largely farmland.
The climb came later. In 1990 the club added the New Course, to a Paul Krings design, working up the Benahavís side of its ground, and the official register still records that split: the club itself stands in Estepona while the urbanisation above it is filed in Benahavís. The houses followed the fairways uphill through the nineties and two thousands, community by community rather than to any single master plan. On the northern edge, nine more holes arrived at El Higueral, a par thirty six course the town hall describes as set in the gentle hills of the municipality, with its address on the Benahavís road.
What all that adds up to is written in the register. The Catastro files this one hillside under five names, Alquería, Altos de la Alquería, Capanes, Montmelián and Nueva Atalaya, which is what a place that grew in pieces looks like on paper. And the farm word survived every one of them: on an avenue, on two urbanisations, and in the national mapping agency’s own name for the whole postal entity, La Alquería-El Paraíso.
A villa on the hillside. The plots are what the farm ground became.
The Old Course opened at the foot of the hill, the only Spanish course by a designer responsible for seventy four across Europe.
The Catastro files this one hillside under Alquería, Altos de la Alquería, Capanes, Montmelián and Nueva Atalaya.
Living here
A small municipality that runs its own services
The school run goes down to the coast road and then a few minutes either way. Colegio San José, a private bilingual school running from Infant through to the International Baccalaureate Diploma, has one campus towards Estepona and another at Guadalmina. Laude San Pedro International College takes children from two and a half to eighteen, and Aloha College Marbella, founded in 1982 and among the first schools in Spain to offer the International Baccalaureate, is about twenty minutes east. Up in the village, Benahavís runs its own primary school, the Colegio Público Daidín.
Healthcare is closer than the size of the place suggests. Benahavís runs its own health centre on Avenida Andalucía in the village, because this is your municipality rather than Estepona’s or Marbella’s. The Hospital de Alta Resolución de Estepona, a Servicio Andaluz de Salud centre working to the single visit model, has run a 24 hour emergency unit since July 2022 and is the nearest hospital. The private hospitals most residents use are east towards Marbella, and Helicópteros Sanitarios has run a 24 hour home doctor and ambulance service out of Puerto Banús since 1988.
Getting about is a short drive in every direction and a walk in almost none. Benahavís village is about nine minutes up the road, Cancelada and the coast about ten minutes down it, San Pedro a little over ten and Puerto Banús about twelve. Estepona town is roughly twenty minutes west, Gibraltar about an hour, and Málaga airport a little over an hour east. There is no train, so a car is part of life here.
What the hillside itself gives you is height without drama. The ground rises from about fifty metres beside the Atalaya courses to about a hundred and fifteen on the ridge, enough for most of the villas to look over the fairways to the sea, not so much that the drive home becomes a mountain road. And at the top of your own road is a village that calls itself the dining room of Andalucía, with what its tourist board says is the highest concentration of restaurants in the region.
A terrace above the fairway. The golf keeps both ends of the ground open, and the houses look over it to the sea.
Schools
Colegio San José towards Estepona and at Guadalmina, Infant to IB Diploma; Laude San Pedro and Aloha College down the coast road; the village runs its own primary school, Daidín.
Healthcare
Benahavís has its own health centre in the village; the Hospital de Alta Resolución de Estepona has run 24 hour emergencies since July 2022; a 24 hour home doctor service works out of Puerto Banús.
Getting about
Nine minutes to Benahavís village, about ten to the coast at Cancelada, twelve to Puerto Banús, twenty to Estepona, an hour to Gibraltar. A car is part of life.
The village
Your own town hall is nine minutes up the road, in a village that calls itself the dining room of Andalucía and claims the region’s highest concentration of restaurants.
What things cost
What is asked, and what was paid
Two numbers both get called “the price” here, and they are kept apart. Registered sale prices are only published by postcode, and postcode 29679 covers La Alquería together with the rest of the Benahavís hillside, so the deed figure reads as the municipality’s hills rather than as this address. The asking prices are La Alquería’s own, and they are the figures to lead with.
Asking prices, per square metre
The bar is the middle half of what is being asked for each type in La Alquería right now, from the cheapest quarter to the dearest. The number in the row is the typical figure. Nothing here has necessarily sold at these prices; that is what the panel beside it is for.
Asking prices per built square metre, resale stock listed in La Alquería, 126 properties in total, as at 8 August 2026. From our own records.
What buyers actually paid
Registered sale prices are only published by postcode, and postcode 29679 covers La Alquería together with the rest of the Benahavís hillside. So the deed figure below is for the whole district rather than for La Alquería alone. Across it, homes completed this year at a typical €4,529 per square metre.
Read the two panels together and the lesson is the usual one: asking prices run over standing stock, which quietly accumulates every overpriced home that never sells, while deeds count only what traded. The gap between them is mostly that selection effect, not a discount waiting to be claimed. Read that as a floor rather than a market rate. At this level a large share of houses are held inside a company, and when one sells it is often the company that changes hands rather than the house. A share transfer is not a conveyance, so it never reaches the property register and never enters the price per square metre the registers publish. What the official figure captures here is the smaller and more conventional part of the market. The full postcode picture, by property type, is on the La Quinta page.
- Postcode 29679, all homes€4,529619 deeds
- Postcode 29679, apartments€3,627457 deeds
- Postcode 29679, houses€5,498162 deeds
JUST Real Estate analysis of registered deed prices, Portal Estadístico del Notariado, rolling 12 months, captured 15 August 2026. Postcode 29679 covers La Alquería together with the rest of the Benahavís hillside. Prices are moving: the official house price index for Andalucía rose 4.1 per cent in the year to 2025 Q4 (INE); the index is not published below regional level.
What you can buy
The stock that actually exists here
for sale in La Alquería
87% of the stock
5% of the stock
4% of the stock
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 see every resale property listed through an agency on this coast, which means we know both what is genuinely on the market in La Alquería and where the same home is being advertised more than once. This covers resale stock only, not new construction sold directly by developers.
The shape of what comes to market here is the least mixed of the Benahavís golf addresses: a house on its own plot, almost to the exclusion of everything else, with a handful of building plots and the odd penthouse, townhouse or apartment making up the rest. The hillside filled in as villa communities between two golf courses it does not own, rather than as a resort with apartments arranged around its own fairways, and that is precisely the difference between La Alquería and both of its golf neighbours. It suits people who want the golf beside them rather than beneath them.
- Houses and villas10987% of listings
- Plots65% of listings
- Penthouses54% of listings
- Townhouses32% of listings
- Apartments32% of listings
Resale stock listed in La Alquería as at 8 August 2026, from our own records. Treat it as accurate to within five to ten per cent: a few near identical apartments in the same building are not always recognised as the same home when the sources are brought together.
Asking prices and supply as at 8 August 2026 · deed prices captured 15 August 2026 · refreshed each week
What it costs to own
The figure nobody official publishes
Every buyer eventually asks what a house here costs to hold, and no public body answers it. We can, because we record it. Across the La Alquería listings that publish their running costs, the median annual property tax, the IBI, is €1,513, and the median community charge is €2,208. Together that is €3,721 a year before utilities, staff, pool and garden.
That figure is the quietest argument the hillside makes. La Quinta, the municipality’s other golf address, runs at €4,125 a year on the same measure, Los Flamingos next door at €5,099, and La Zagaleta on the high ground at €15,977. The comparison that does the work is Los Flamingos: the two hillsides ask within a hundred euros a square metre of each other, and a house there costs about a third more a year to hold. La Quinta asks roughly fourteen hundred euros a square metre more than this hillside and still costs more to run. The community charge is still the larger half, as it is on any hillside of separate communities, but the whole figure lands lower, and the tax is levied by Benahavís on the Catastro’s value for the parcel underneath, one more reason to identify that parcel exactly.
Have the number in front of you before you make an offer rather than after, and ask what the charge buys in the specific community you are viewing. On this hillside the answer varies more than the single name suggests.
per year
per year
per year
The garden, the pool and the view over the fairways are what the charge and the tax keep. From our own records, 62 listings publishing running costs, as at 8 August 2026.
La Alquería compared to nearby areas
The Benahavís ladder, in order
Four addresses share one municipality and one deed postcode, and on villa asking prices they fall into two clear pairs rather than one line: La Zagaleta and La Quinta at the top, then Los Flamingos and La Alquería roughly fourteen hundred euros a square metre below them. What separates them after that is what they cost to hold, and that order is not the same one: La Alquería and Los Flamingos ask within a hundred euros a square metre of each other, and a house at Los Flamingos costs about a third more a year to run.
| Address | Typical asking, per m² | Listed | Running costs, per year | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| La Zagaleta | €8,698 | 8 houses and villas | €15,977 | The private estate on the high ground, behind its own gate |
| La Quinta | €8,672 | 347 houses and villas | €4,125 | The golf valley behind Nueva Andalucía, villas above and apartments around the course |
| Los Flamingos | €7,306 | 142 houses and villas | €5,099 | Three courses in one resort, the next slope west |
| La Alquería | €7,231 | 108 houses and villas | €3,721 | The villa hillside between Atalaya and El Higueral |
Typical is the median asking price per built square metre for the type of home most listed in each area, named beside the count (houses and villas, or apartments), as at 8 August 2026; running costs are the median annual IBI plus community charge where enough listings publish them. From our own records.
La Alquería is the one on this list that owns no golf course and sells almost nothing but houses, and the market prices it level with a neighbour that costs a good deal more to hold. Whether that makes it the sensible purchase or merely the quiet one depends on how you intend to live, and that is a conversation rather than a table.
Wider context: our guide to Benahavís, area by area, and our property market data behind every figure on this page.
Who buys here
Three buyers, and what La Alquería gives each of them
The year-round home.
This is a hillside in a small municipality that runs its own services. The village, nine minutes up the road, has the town hall, a public health centre and its own primary school, the international schools of the coast are a few minutes down the hill in either direction, and none of it closes when the season ends.
The holiday home.
Golf at both ends of the hillside, the beach about ten minutes below, Puerto Banús about twelve, and the coast never underneath you. For anyone who has owned on the seafront and found the summer loud, a villa up here is usually the answer.
The long hold.
Two golf courses fix the edges of this hillside, the municipal line fixes its foot, and what comes to market is nearly all houses on their own plots. An address that unmixed does not get remade, because there is nothing left to remake it with.
Common questions
Questions we are asked about La Alquería
Is La Alquería in Benahavís or Estepona?
Benahavís, wholly. Checked against the official registers in August 2026, only the Benahavís callejero carries the Alquería entries: the urbanisations Alquería and Altos de la Alquería and the Avenida de la Alquería. Neither Marbella’s nor Estepona’s returns any. The municipal line runs along the foot of the hill, which is why the Atalaya club itself stands in Estepona while the ground above it is Benahavís, and why the avenue’s postcodes span 29679 and 29688. The town hall that licenses and bills a house follows the parcel, so we establish it before you offer.
What does the name La Alquería mean?
It is the old Arabic word qarya carried into Spanish: a farmstead hamlet, the cluster of houses and working buildings that was the basic unit of the countryside in al-Andalus. The name is a plain description of what this hillside was for centuries, and the 1956 aerial photography still shows the field boundaries it describes.
Is La Alquería a gated community?
No. It is a hillside of separate residential communities carrying one name, and the register files the ground under several more. Some communities operate their own gates and security, some villas stand on open streets, and charges vary a great deal from one to the next. Ask us about the arrangements at a specific address before you decide.
What type of property for sale in La Alquería is most common?
Houses, overwhelmingly. Of the 126 resale properties currently listed here, 109 are houses, with 6 plots of land, 5 penthouses, 3 townhouses and 3 apartments making up the rest. None of the golf addresses it is usually compared with is anywhere near as unmixed, and it is the clearest single fact about what the hillside is.
What does it cost to run a home in La Alquería?
Across the listings that publish their running costs, the median annual IBI is €1,513 and the median community charge €2,208, together €3,721 a year before utilities, staff, pool and garden. That is below La Quinta at €4,125, below Los Flamingos at €5,099, and a long way below La Zagaleta at €15,977. No official body publishes this figure. It comes from our own records.
Which golf courses are next to La Alquería?
Two grounds hold the ends of the hillside. At the foot is the Atalaya club, whose Old Course opened in 1968 to a Bernhard von Limburger design, his only course in Spain, and whose New Course of 1990 climbs the Benahavís side. On the northern edge is El Higueral, nine holes at par thirty six on the Benahavís road. Neither belongs to La Alquería itself, in a municipality whose own tourist board counts twelve courses and calls it second in Spain only to Marbella.
For sale now
Current property for sale in La Alquería
A selection of what is for sale in La Alquería right now. Every home we are listing here, with asking prices, is on the page for property for sale in La Alquería.
5 bedroom villa for sale in La Alqueria, Benahavis
- 5 beds
- 6 baths
- Plot: 1,427 m²
- Interior: 616 m²
8 bedroom villa for sale in La Alqueria, Benahavis
- 8 beds
- 7 baths
- Plot: 1,286 m²
- Interior: 1,089 m²
5 bedroom villa for sale in La Alqueria, Benahavis
- 5 beds
- 5 baths
- Plot: 1,539 m²
- Interior: 530 m²
5 bedroom villa for sale in La Alqueria, Benahavis
- 5 beds
- 6 baths
- Plot: 1,453 m²
- Interior: 632 m²
5 bedroom villa for sale in La Alqueria, Benahavis
- 5 beds
- 5 baths
- Plot: 1,453 m²
Free download
The Marbella Buyers Guide
Everything a buyer needs before the first viewing in La Alquería or anywhere else on the coast: the purchase process step by step, the taxes and fees, the checks that decide whether a property is sound, and how the market has actually been behaving.
- ProcessReservation, private contract, completion at the notary, and the timings between them.
- CostsTransfer tax, VAT on new build, notary, registry and legal fees, worked through on a real price.
- ChecksCadastre, land registry, planning status, community accounts and running costs.
Prefer to read it online? The buyers guide page. Every figure on this page sits in our property market data.
Talk to us
Tell us how you want to live on this hillside
La Alquería, Los Flamingos and La Quinta share one municipality and suit different people. Tell us what the days should look like, and we will send you the houses that deliver it, with the honest drawbacks of each, the parcel identified on the official register and the running costs in front of you before you view.
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.
We have 25 years of experience in this market.
