Old Town Properties for Sale

More than seventy monumental murals cover the gable-ends of Estepona's apartment blocks — a municipal art project begun in 2012 that turned an unremarkable working town on the western Costa del Sol into one of the most photographed places in Málaga province. The murals are the easy part to notice. What takes longer to register, and matters far more to anyone weighing up a home here, is the town beneath them: pedestrianised, flower-filled, lived in twelve months a year, and still priced well below Marbella, twenty-five minutes east.

The road west from Marbella runs flat along the Costa del Sol for forty minutes before the Sotogrande exit materialises off the AP-7 — a slip road into Cádiz province that most property buyers exploring the coast between Marbella and Estepona never take. Those who do arrive at a landscape that bears almost no resemblance to the high-density development that lines the motorway on either side: wide, fenced paddocks of bright Bermuda grass, an atmosphere of unhurried money, and, between July and late August, the most concentrated gathering of serious polo players in Europe.

Where do you keep the boat? For a certain kind of Costa del Sol buyer that question comes before bedrooms, before orientation, before the school run. Between Benalmádena and Estepona, five working marinas hold just over 3,000 berths between them — and each one anchors a property micro-market with its own character, price level and buyer profile.