When Spain closed its Golden Visa to property buyers on 3 April 2025, the working assumption across the Costa del Sol was that the top of the Marbella market would wobble. The scheme had, after all, granted Spanish residency to non-EU nationals who spent at least €500,000 on property, and the Marbella area was one of its shop windows. A year on, the figures from the Colegio de Registradores, Spain's property registrars, point the other way: foreign demand in Málaga province did not fall away — it held close to a record high.
That distance between what was forecast and what actually happened is the single most useful thing to grasp about the Marbella-area market today. The end of the Golden Visa was the most-discussed regulatory change in a decade of Costa del Sol property, and it has turned out to be one of the least consequential for prices. Why it landed so softly says a great deal about who really buys here, how much the visa ever mattered, and where the real openings sit for buyers in 2026.
What Spain actually scrapped
Spain introduced the Golden Visa in 2013, through Law 14/2013, as a post-crisis instrument to pull foreign capital into the economy. In its property form it offered residency to non-EU nationals who invested at least €500,000 in Spanish real estate, with no mortgage permitted against that sum. Parallel routes existed for those placing €2 million in government bonds or €1 million in Spanish company shares or funds, but property was always the headline. The route was abolished under Organic Law 1/2025, published on 3 January 2025, with the granting of new investor visas ending from 3 April 2025.
For all the attention it drew, the programme was never large. According to the Permanent Immigration Observatory, Spain granted just 22,430 Golden Visas across the entire decade from 2013 to 2023. It began almost imperceptibly, with only 157 approvals in its first year, and the bulk of demand came from Chinese and Russian nationals, followed by Iranians, Americans, and non-EU Europeans including Ukrainians and post-Brexit Britons. Spanish Property Insight's review of the scheme describes its influence on the national market as "modest in scale but concentrated in impact."
That concentration was not, for the most part, in Marbella. Seven provinces accounted for 93% of all Golden Visa home purchases, and the clear leaders were Barcelona, with 7,561 investments over the decade, and Madrid, with 3,990. Málaga — the province that contains Marbella, Estepona and Benahavís — recorded 3,976 over ten years, an average of roughly four hundred a year. Set against a province where foreigners now buy many thousands of homes annually, the visa was closer to a rounding error than an engine.
The political logic behind the closure had little to do with the Costa del Sol either. The government framed the move around housing affordability in pressured urban markets, with the Housing Minister, Isabel Rodríguez, presenting it as a way to "open more opportunities for people struggling to access affordable housing." Even at the time, advisers pointed out the obvious: the volume of transactions actually driven by Golden Visas was low relative to the overall size of Spain's property market, and lower still on the coast.
The shock that never arrived
If the visa had been holding up Costa del Sol demand, its removal should have shown up quickly in the 2025 transaction data. It did not. In Málaga province, foreign buyers reached a record 34.75% of all purchases in the first quarter of 2025 — the very months when buyers were racing to beat the April deadline — and still accounted for roughly a third of the market by the year's end, according to the Colegio de Registradores.
The national picture was the same. Registrars estimate that foreigners bought around 97,500 homes across Spain in 2025, more than in 2024, even as the visa route closed. Total Spanish home sales passed 705,000 for the year, up more than 10% and the highest figure since 2008. A market losing a supposedly important demand channel does not usually post its strongest year in seventeen.
Prices followed the same upward line. Average values in Málaga province climbed to roughly €3,200 per square metre by the end of 2025, up around 13% on the year. In Marbella itself, asking prices have settled at around €5,300 to €5,600 per square metre in early 2026 (Idealista), with the most sought-after corridors trading far above that. None of this is the signature of a market that has lost its prop.
There was one genuine, if small, fingerprint. Nationally, in the first half of 2025, purchases by non-resident foreigners slipped about 4% year on year, while purchases by foreigners already resident in Spain rose more than 6%. The Golden Visa buyer was, by definition, a non-resident — so a modest cooling at that precise margin is exactly what you would expect. It was simply far too small to bend the overall curve, and resident demand more than absorbed it.
Why €500,000 was never the Marbella story
The deeper reason the policy barely registered is arithmetic. A €500,000 budget buys a comfortable apartment across much of the Costa del Sol, but it sits below the entry point for prime Marbella. New-build villas in the established addresses begin in the low single-digit millions and run well beyond; even apartments on the Golden Mile and in Nueva Andalucía's Golf Valley are priced at a level where the visa threshold was incidental. For the typical prime buyer here, residency was a by-product of a purchase they were making anyway — not the reason for it.
Who that buyer is matters just as much as what they spend. The backbone of Marbella-area demand is, and long has been, citizens of other EU countries — British buyers established here for decades, alongside Northern Europeans from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia — none of whom ever needed an investor visa to own a home in Spain. The Golden Visa only ever spoke to the non-EU minority, and even there, many bought above or below the threshold for lifestyle reasons rather than paperwork.
This is why the coast's experience diverged so sharply from the cities. The slowdown advisers feared was always most plausible in central Barcelona and Madrid, where non-EU investor money had clustered most heavily. On the Costa del Sol, where the market runs on second homes, relocation and lifestyle, the same policy change passed almost unnoticed. For a fuller sense of how rental demand and returns underpin that lifestyle market, our analysis of Marbella rental yields in 2026 sets out what coastal property actually earns.
The buyers who don't need a visa
The demand that replaced any lost visa interest is, if anything, broader than before. The Registradores' 2025 breakdown still shows British buyers as the largest foreign group in the province, followed by Dutch, German, Belgian and French purchasers — the familiar Northern European spine of the Costa del Sol market. None of them required residency by investment; most are buying a holiday home, a relocation base, or a long-term asset they intend to keep.
The newer force is American. Knight Frank attributes part of Iberia's standout 2025 — when Spain and Portugal delivered some of Europe's strongest prime growth — to inflows "from northern Europe, the US and Latin America." US buyers have moved up the rankings of foreign purchasers in Spain and tend to pay among the highest prices per square metre of any nationality, helped along by the arrival of direct flights between the United States and Málaga. Crucially, American demand was never tied to the Golden Visa; it is driven by lifestyle, the dollar, and a search for stability.
The wider 2025 backdrop helped too. The European Central Bank delivered four interest-rate cuts over the year, cheapening euro debt; a softer euro made Spanish property better value for dollar and sterling buyers; and the abolition of the United Kingdom's non-dom tax regime nudged some mobile wealth toward continental Europe. Those forces comfortably dwarfed anything the visa change subtracted. The shifting buyer map is something we track in detail in our look at the Golden Triangle's 2025 data and its new buyer nations.
What it means for buyers in 2026
The most important shift for 2026 is not the visa's absence but the market's tempo. Knight Frank's Prime International Residential Index recorded global prime price growth of just 3.2% in 2025, and the Costa del Sol comfortably outpaced that — with the index singling out Marbella, alongside Méribel, as remaining "in strong demand as generational family retreats." After the double-digit surges of recent years, growth here is moderating to a more sustainable pace, which rewards considered decisions over urgency.
There is a quieter benefit to the visa's removal, as well. With the residency incentive gone, the buyers left in the market are here for the home and the asset, not for an immigration shortcut — a cleaner and more durable basis for demand than speculative paperwork ever was. The structural story is unchanged: scarce developable land in the best addresses, two decades of consistent international interest, and a top tier that keeps pulling away from the rest, as our coverage of Marbella's branded-residence boom shows in detail.
For a buyer, the practical takeaway is that 2026 is a more rational market than the headlines around the Golden Visa implied. Demand is deep and genuinely international, prices are firm but no longer vertical, and the value increasingly sits in well-chosen new-build a step away from the absolute peak of the prime tier. The visa was never what made the Costa del Sol worth owning — and its absence changes very little about the case for buying here.
If you are weighing where that value sits across Marbella, Estepona, Benahavís and the wider Costa del Sol, browse the current selection of new-build and resale homes on Domosmar, or speak directly with our team for a shortlist matched to your budget and to how you plan to use the property.
