El Madroñal Properties for Sale

Between €4,600 and €7,200 per square metre, three gated communities along the Benahavís road offer mountain views, championship golf and 24-hour security — without La Zagaleta's minimum ticket. A buyer's guide to the middle tier of the market.

A municipality of fewer than 10,000 people keeps more than twenty well-known restaurants in business, twelve months a year, in a single mountain village reached by one road off the coast. That ratio has no real parallel anywhere else on the Costa del Sol — and it is why Andalusians who could eat anywhere between Málaga and Gibraltar so often point their cars uphill to Benahavís instead.

No town in Andalucía declares a higher average income than Benahavís. The Spanish Tax Agency's latest figures put it at €43,159 a year, and idealista's index has the municipality's homes changing hands at €5,391 per square metre — a regional record and, by idealista's own account, an all-time high. What makes the figure strange is what it averages over: one municipality that runs from a whitewashed mountain village of cobbled lanes up to La Zagaleta, the most expensive private estate in Spain.