Guide · Planning
Marbella’s New General Plan
What the PGOM classifies, what it permits, and what it leaves to the plan that follows it, with the procedural record to September 2026 and the checks that matter before you buy land or property in this municipality.
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Guide · Planning
The Marbella PGOM Guide
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Welcome
Marbella is close to having a plan that matches the city it became.
The Plan General de Ordenación Municipal, the PGOM, is the first full rewrite of Marbella’s planning framework since 1986. The council votes on its definitive approval on Friday 18 September 2026. This guide sets out what it says, what it does not say, and what changes for anyone who owns land or property here.
Two facts sit underneath everything that follows. The first is that the 1986 PGOU is still the
plan in force. The 2010 revision meant to replace it was annulled by the Tribunal Supremo, the first
of those judgments dated 27 October 2015, and the 1986 document recovered its validity. The second is
that Andalucía changed the rules in between. LISTA, Ley 7/2021, de 1 de diciembre, replaced the single
all-in-one PGOU with a two-tier system: a strategic PGOM, and a detailed POU that follows it.
The PGOM has now cleared every stage but the last. Under LISTA the council approves it, and it takes
effect only once published in the Boletín Oficial de la Provincia de Málaga.
JUST Real Estate was founded in Marbella in 2015. Our managing partner has worked this market for 25 years. This guide is not legal advice, but we read these documents for clients every week and
we work with the architects and planning lawyers who do nothing else.
What this guide covers
- Where the plan stands today
- Why Marbella needed a new plan
- PGOM and PGOU, what actually changed
- Land classification under LISTA
- Zoning and permitted uses
- Development rights and parameters
- Regularisation and legacy buildings
- Growth areas, sectors and infrastructure
- What to check before you buy
- Environmental and coastal limits
- What it means for owners and investors
- Working with JUST
The procedural record
Where the plan stands today
02 · The background
Why Marbella needed a new plan
The 1986 PGOU was written for a coastal town. Its revision began so quickly after approval that a
complete Texto Refundido was never finished, and its planning norms were not published in the provincial
bulletin until November 2000. The council’s own file calls the result extremely complex to apply.
A new PGOU was approved in 2010 to modernise zoning and to bring a great deal of irregular development
into a coherent framework. The Tribunal Supremo annulled it, the first of several judgments dated
27 October 2015. The grounds were procedural rather than aesthetic. The court held that the plan
sought to modulate the legalisation of what had been built unlawfully, which conflicts with the rules on
executing judgments and with effective judicial protection; that it altered the legal concept of suelo
urbano no consolidado; that it imposed planning obligations on the promoters of illegal works who were no
longer the owners; and that it lacked a strategic environmental assessment and an economic sustainability
report.
Marbella reverted to 1986, and for a decade was administered under an instrument that no longer
described it. Licensing became case-by-case interpretation.
Then the ground moved again. In 2021 Andalucía replaced the LOUA outright. What Marbella is finishing
now is not a tidied version of the old plan but a different instrument under a different law.
Two tiers, not one
PGOM and PGOU, what actually changed
LISTA, Ley 7/2021, de 1 de diciembre, de impulso para la sostenibilidad del territorio de
Andalucía, came into force on 23 December 2021 and repealed the LOUA. Its general regulation,
Decreto 550/2022, de 29 de noviembre, published in BOJA on 2 December 2022, runs to 430 articles
and supplies the detail. Between them they replaced the single comprehensive PGOU with two instruments.
The PGOM, Plan General de Ordenación Municipal, is the strategic tier. It classifies land, fixes
the structuring elements of the municipality, delimits what must be protected for its historic, cultural
or architectural value, and sets the criteria for new urbanisation. It does not decide the storey height
on your street.
The POU, Plan de Ordenación Urbana, is the detailed tier. It supplies the ordenación detallada of
urban land: the parameters that decide what a specific plot may carry. Marbella has begun work on its POU
and an avance covering the whole municipal territory has been published. The mayor expects it by spring 2027;
with no POU yet initially approved, we plan on 2028 to 2029.
This is the point most summaries miss, and the council’s file is explicit about it. Until the POU comes
into force, the 1986 PGOU and its approved development instruments continue to apply to urban land. The
PGOM does not answer the question everyone asks first, what may be built on a particular plot. It answers
a prior one: what class is this land, and what does the municipality intend for it.
The second change is structural resilience. Under the old model a procedural defect anywhere could
bring the whole plan down, as happened in 2015. Separating strategy from detail
confines the damage to the tier where it occurs. The council’s file also warns against the lazy reading of
the reform: PGOM and POU are not the old division between structural and detailed planning under new
names, and treating them that way produces wrong answers.
A third point matters more than it sounds. LISTA applies directly and immediately: where the
1986 plan and LISTA conflict, LISTA governs, and where the PGOM makes its own provision, the PGOM prevails.
A planning sheet drawn under the old regime is read through two later filters.
The vocabulary that changed
Land classification under LISTA
LISTA recognises two classes of land, not three. Suelo urbanizable no longer exists as a class, and suelo urbano is no longer split into consolidado and no consolidado. What replaces that split is the type of transformation action a piece of land requires. Article numbers below are Ley 7/2021.
| Class or category | What it is | What it means for an owner or investor |
|---|---|---|
| Suelo urbano art. 13 |
Land in the urban fabric, served by roads, utilities and dotaciones, or already urbanised in execution of planning. | The highest certainty. Direct licensing where the plot is serviced. The detailed parameters still come from the 1986 plan until the POU takes effect. |
| Actuación de mejora urbana art. 27 |
In suelo urbano: added buildability, added dwellings, or a change of use or typology requiring new dotaciones. | Upside exists but it is paid for. New dotaciones, cession and the duties in article 28 attach before any licence issues. |
| Actuación de reforma interior art. 29 |
In suelo urbano: a new ordering of an area because services are obsolete, the setting degraded or the uses must change. | Longer horizon, planning instrument first, duties under article 30. The route for tired commercial and mixed blocks. |
| Actuación de nueva urbanización art. 31 |
In suelo rústico común: urbanising land needed for urban growth, economic activity or to complete the structure. | The growth route. Designation is intent, not a licence. Detailed planning, urbanisation project, cessions and cost under article 32 all come first. |
| Suelo rústico común art. 14.1.d) |
All rústico that is neither specially protected nor preserved. | The only rústico that can become a new urbanisation sector. Ordinary rústico uses only until it does. |
| Rústico especialmente protegido art. 14.1.a) |
Protected by sectoral law: public domain, environment, nature, historic heritage. | Treat development potential as nil. Enforcement here is not subject to the ordinary six-year limit. |
| Rústico preservado, riesgos art. 14.1.b) |
Preserved because natural processes or human activity generate risk, flooding and landslip among them. | Preserved for as long as the risk subsists. Read the hydraulic mapping before valuing anything on it. |
| Rústico preservado, ordenación art. 14.1.c) |
Preserved by the territorial or urban plan on ecological, agricultural, forestry, landscape or general-interest grounds. | A planning judgment rather than a sectoral one, so it can change with a plan. Not quickly, and not on application. |
05 · Use
Zoning and permitted uses
Classification decides whether land is urban or rústico. Zoning decides what may happen on it. The
PGOM allocates use at structural level and leaves compatibility and intensity to the POU and to municipal
ordinances, so a zoning designation gives you the direction of travel rather than the final answer.
Residential zoning subdivides between single-family, multi-family and mixed typologies. Density,
height, buildability and occupation all follow from the designation and are specified in the detailed
instrument, not here.
Hotel and tourist use stays strategically significant. The plan identifies both where hotel use
is the primary function and where it may sit inside a mixed-use scheme, among the more consequential
allocations in a municipality that runs on hospitality.
Commercial zoning covers retail, offices and service premises, and in consolidated streets it
commonly sits at ground floor beneath housing, as it does throughout San Pedro de Alcántara.
Industrial and logistics use is limited here by comparison with the metropolitan municipalities,
but it exists in designated areas and matters to anyone buying beside one.
Public facilities zoning reserves land for schools, health, administration and sport. In
transformation areas that land is ceded rather than bought, which is exactly why the cession schedule
belongs in a land valuation.
What a plot can carry
Development rights and parameters
Once class and zone are settled, the question is what the plot may actually hold. Five parameters do
most of the work, and they bind together rather than separately.
Edificabilidad, buildability, is the maximum constructed floor area permitted, expressed as a
ratio to the plot’s surface. It decides whether a scheme works financially, and small movements in the
coefficient move land value materially. Confirm it from the planning file, never from a brochure.
Ocupación, occupation, caps the percentage of the plot that may be covered at ground level. A
generous buildability with a tight occupation produces a taller, narrower building rather than a larger
footprint. In the low-density hillside and golf communities it is what preserves the character buyers are
paying for.
Height is expressed in storeys or metres and is controlled most tightly where it is most
visible, on the seafront and the elevated slopes. Setbacks fix minimum distances to boundaries and
to the public road, and breaches of them are among the most common irregularities we meet in due
diligence, usually in extensions, pool houses and terraces enclosed years after completion.
Density caps the number of dwellings in a defined area. It applies mainly to multi-dwelling
schemes and transformation sectors, and because it drives infrastructure demand it is where the plan’s
growth arithmetic actually lives.
The reserve for vivienda protegida is routinely misattributed. The PGOM invents no bespoke
Marbella quota: its own text provides that the reserve is the one set by LISTA and its Reglamento, except
where a plan approved under the previous law had already fixed a different figure. Ask anyone quoting a
municipal percentage which document it comes from.
Two cautions to close. Until the POU is in force, the detailed parameters for urban land still come
from the 1986 plan and the instruments approved under it, read subject to LISTA and to the PGOM. And a
parameter that looks achievable in isolation is frequently constrained by another: plots are bought on a
buildability figure that the occupation limit and the setback lines then make unbuildable in the shape the
buyer had in mind.
Licences, time and status
Regularisation and legacy buildings
The annulment of the 2010 plan did not make anything unlawful that was lawful before, and the PGOM does not make anything lawful that is not. Individual status is an individual question, and it turns on the licence, on what was actually built, and on the calendar.
Under article 153.1, measures to restore territorial and urban legality may be adopted only
while works or uses are in progress, and for six years after their complete termination, or from
the appearance of external signs that reveal them. Once that window closes on an irregular building,
demolition is off the table.
Article 153.2 removes the limit entirely for certain works, which may be pursued at any time:
those on the public domain and on protection easements; those in rústico preserved for landslip, flood
or similar risk, while the risk subsists; those in the coastal influence zone on rústico; those
affecting buildings individually listed in the Catálogo General del Patrimonio Histórico de Andalucía;
and those affecting green zones and public spaces. In those places the clock never runs out.
Where the six years have run and the building meets minimum safety and health conditions, it may be
declared in the situation of asimilado a fuera de ordenación, AFO. The regime sits in Title VIII
of LISTA and in Title VIII of Decreto 550/2022, replacing the older Decreto 2/2012 route.
Article 174 is explicit that the declaration does not legalise the building, produces no effect
on other proceedings the works gave rise to, and is without prejudice to the courts. It records that
enforcement is no longer available, and allows the property to be used, serviced and registered. It does
not restore development rights, so extension, subdivision and substantial alteration stay restricted.
Keep the vocabulary straight. A building that was lawful and has been made non-conforming by a new
plan is fuera de ordenación. A building that was never lawful but can no longer be pursued is
asimilado a fuera de ordenación. Different statuses, different consequences on a resale.
Where expansion is channelled
Growth areas, sectors and the cost of infrastructure
Beyond the built city, the PGOM identifies where growth is appropriate and where it is not. These are
the actuaciones de nueva urbanización of article 31, taken from suelo rústico común where land is
needed for urban growth, for economic activity, or to complete the urban structure.
Designation is not buildability. Activation runs through detailed planning, an urbanisation project,
environmental assessment and, usually, an agreement with the council. Land carrying a sector reference on
a plan and land carrying a building licence are separated by years and by money.
Cargas urbanísticas are that money. Owners in a transformation area participate proportionally
in building the roads, the water and sewage networks, the electricity and telecommunications, the drainage
and the public lighting, and they cede land for green space, road alignment and public facilities. Article
32 sets out the duties for new urbanisation, articles 28 and 30 those for the two urban actions.
The practical question on any sectorised parcel is never whether the obligations exist. It is how far
through them the land already is. Urbanisation works may be complete, partly executed or entirely pending,
and that difference is the difference between a two-year and a ten-year horizon. It is also the difference
between a price that reflects the finished article and one that reflects the work still to be done.
In consolidated urban land the position is simpler. The infrastructure is in place and obligations
reduce to connection charges and ordinance compliance, which is a large part of why serviced urban plots
price at a premium to sectorised land carrying the same nominal buildability.
Geography sharpens all of it. The municipality covers 117.3 square kilometres after the Junta’s
boundary deslindes, pinched between the sea and the sierra with substantial protected ground behind. Where
a plan concentrates growth in a municipality with little room, the sectors it names carry weight, and the
sequence in which they are brought forward carries almost as much.
Before you commit
What to check before you buy
Seven checks, all documentary, all of them tied to the transition this municipality is going through. None is expensive relative to what it protects, and the first of them answers most of the rest.
Law that sits above the plan
Environmental and coastal limits
Municipal planning is the floor, not the ceiling. Three bodies of law sit above or alongside the PGOM
and, where they bite, they decide the outcome whatever the zoning says.
The coast. Spain’s Ley de Costas fixes the maritime-terrestrial public domain by deslinde and
imposes a servidumbre de protección inland of it, within which new construction, alteration and change of
use are restricted and in places prohibited. Beyond it runs the zona de influencia del litoral, carrying
conditions on height, density and visual impact. LISTA reinforces this: article 153.2 removes the
enforcement time limit for works on the public domain, on the protection easement, and in the coastal
influence zone on rústico. A seafront position is the most valuable and the most heavily regulated ground
in the municipality.
Water. Marbella is cut by riverbeds and seasonal watercourses that are dry for most of the year
and emphatically not dry in November. Hydraulic planning maps flood risk, and LISTA preserves as rústico
any land where natural processes generate risk, while the risk subsists. Urban classification does not
exempt a plot from a flood study.
Landscape and nature. Sectoral protection classifies land as rústico especialmente protegido,
and in the hillside sectors, Sierra Blanca among them, landscape integration is routinely the determining
factor in whether a licence is granted. Earth movement, tree removal, slope modification and building volume are all in play on the
slopes above the town.
These overlays are also why the enforcement calendar is not uniform. On protected ground the six-year
limit in article 153.1 does not run, so a structure beyond challenge inland can remain challengeable
indefinitely on the shoreline, in a watercourse or on a listed site. Buyers assume the passage of time
settles everything. On this ground it settles nothing.
None of this is cause for pessimism. It is a substantial part of the reason Marbella still looks the
way it does, and the reason the stock behind these constraints holds its value. A land appraisal stopping
at the municipal plan has read one document out of three.
What it changes in practice
What it means for owners and investors
Two readers, two different questions. For owners the plan is mostly reassurance and better paperwork. For anyone buying land it changes where the risk sits and, more usefully, makes that risk legible, which is the precondition institutional capital sets before it enters a jurisdiction at scale.
If your home was built under a valid licence, the PGOM changes nothing about its legality. The plan
classifies land and sets the municipality’s intent. It does not reopen individual titles, and the
council’s executive summary states expressly that no area of the plan suspends planning, execution or
licensing procedures.
What it does change is the quality of the answer you can get. One regionally validated instrument
covering the whole municipality replaces a 1986 document with no consolidated text, whose planning norms
were not published until 2000. For anyone selling, refinancing, or applying for a licence on an
extension, that is worth considerably more than it sounds.
Questions
Frequently asked questions about the Marbella PGOM
Is my property illegal because the 2010 PGOU was annulled?
No. The annulment of the 2010 PGOU in 2015 did not automatically invalidate properties constructed under licences granted at the time. Legality depends on whether a valid building licence was issued, whether the building conforms to the approved project and whether any enforcement action was initiated within the statutory period. Each property must be assessed individually.
What is an AFO and should I be concerned?
AFO stands for Asimilado Fuera de Ordenación. It is a legal status applied to buildings that were constructed without full planning compliance but where the administration can no longer order demolition because the enforcement period has expired. An AFO does not legalise the building in the full planning sense. It allows the structure to remain, subject to certain limitations. Buyers acquiring a property with AFO status should understand that future development flexibility can be limited.
What is a Certificate of Antiquity, Certificado de Antigüedad?
A Certificate of Antiquity is a technical document issued by a qualified architect confirming that a building has existed for a specified period of time. It is commonly used where a property was constructed without a formal licence but has exceeded the statutory enforcement period. This certificate may support registration of the building in the Land Registry. It does not substitute a building licence, nor does it automatically grant full planning legality.
Can rural land now be developed under the PGOM?
Not automatically. Rural land, suelo rústico, remains restricted unless specifically designated for transformation within the planning instrument. Without formal classification as urban, or a defined transformation sector, residential development is not permitted beyond limited uses authorised under regional law.
How can I verify a property’s land classification?
Land classification must be confirmed through official municipal planning documentation, not through marketing descriptions or informal statements. Formal urban planning certificates provide authoritative confirmation of classification, zoning and applicable parameters. JUST Real Estate can help obtain and interpret this documentation before you commit to an acquisition.
Does zoning override coastal or environmental legislation?
No. Coastal law, hydraulic risk mapping and environmental protection regulations operate alongside municipal planning. Even where land is classified as urban, additional restrictions may apply that affect development capacity.
Is the Marbella PGOM in force yet?
Not yet. The Junta gave the final plan its green light in February 2026, and the council has called an extraordinary plenary for Friday 18 September 2026 to approve it definitively. The plan takes effect once the approval and its normas urbanísticas are published in the Boletín Oficial de la Provincia de Málaga, and until then the 1986 PGOU remains the framework in force.