Houses for sale in Selwo

A great many of these houses look at the water, and the reason is the ground rather than good fortune with the neighbours. The recently built ones cannot be counted, because a developer ticks the sea view for a whole scheme at once, but the mechanism behind it can be checked on foot in ten minutes.

The hill is the product

The ground climbs from the coastal strip toward the first line of hills steeply enough that each terrace of houses clears the roofs of the one below. A row that stands above the row in front of it has its outlook built in, and nothing put up later can undo it — which is why the terrace is worth standing on rather than the field worth reading.

What the height costs you

The walk to the beach. Not one street on this hill ends at the water, so a towel and a parasol mean getting the car out, and with the shopping or the children aboard it counts for more than the map suggests. The front-line alternatives are on beachfront property and, a few minutes along the coast, Costalita.

And what it gives you in August

Air. A hillside at this height catches the evening breeze that the strip below does not, and several degrees of difference at nine in the evening in July is the kind of thing people who live here mention first and listings never mention at all. A handful of these houses record a forest setting, which is higher still and cooler again.

Shared pools are as common as private ones up here, which for a house market is unusual and follows directly from the kind of houses the hill was built with.

The schemes rather than the plots

A good part of this hill is townhouses and semi-detached homes, almost all of them in gated developments with a shared pool and a landscaped garden. One pool for a terrace of houses uses a steep site far better than one pool each, and the developers who built these schemes did the sensible thing with the ground they had.

What a shared pool is worth on a hill

More than it would be on flat ground. A private pool on a steep plot means retaining walls, drainage and a plant room cut into rock, all of which cost money to build and money to keep. A communal one spreads that across the scheme and somebody else cleans it. For an owner who comes a few times a year it is frequently the better arrangement rather than the compromise.

And where the private pools are

On the detached houses, almost without exception, and on the recent ones as a matter of course. A pool of your own on this hill means a detached plot, so if swimming alone at seven in the morning is part of why you want a house rather than a flat, that is the part of the list to filter for. The two coast-wide lists worth reading beside this one are detached villas and townhouses.

Three kinds, with the detached villa the commonest of them, and the mix explains most of the price range.

The villas

The commonest form on the hill, four bedrooms the usual size, with the largest of the older houses running close to seven hundred square metres on ground of a size the newer schemes do not offer. They run from the entry figure of the district right up to the top of it, which means a detached house up here is not automatically an expensive one.

The townhouses and the pairs

Almost all of them sit in gated schemes stepped down the slope, with interiors between a hundred and twenty and two hundred and fifty square metres, and they hold the lower half of the price range. On a hillside the row matters more than the plot, which is why an attached house can see more water than a detached one two rows lower.

And the thing the plot figures do not tell you

Plot size goes unrecorded on a great many of these listings, and on the recent ones almost always. That is not an omission on our part — the feeds do not carry it, because the edge of a terraced garden is usually a wall somebody built rather than a line somebody surveyed, and developers quote built area instead. If the size of the garden matters, walk its edges rather than reading a figure.

A few of them have a basement

Not many, but worth knowing: on a cut-in hillside house the lowest level is frequently buried at the back and open at the front. A half-buried floor is the coolest room in the house in August, and the natural place for the garage and the plant. A level like that is not always counted in the built area a listing quotes, so a house with a large one reads smaller and dearer by the numbers than it actually is.

Three comparisons, and the first is the one most households on this hill actually make.

Against the flats on the same hill

The apartment market up here is several times the size of this one, stands on the same slope with the same views, and carries both generations of building side by side: apartments in Selwo. If the garden is not the point, a flat buys the same view for far less, and the pool and the gardener come with it.

Against the shore below

Down on the coast is houses in Benamara, almost entirely new, beachside, and considerably dearer per square metre. The view from above or the walk from below — that is the trade in its clearest form. Everything in this district together is on property for sale in Selwo, and the municipal house list is houses for sale in Estepona.

And against the golf valleys inland

Behind the town the valleys put a fairway at the garden boundary and a clubhouse at the end of the road, on flatter ground and with larger plots, and the beach is a drive from there as well: houses in Valle Romano. A valley sells the grass and a hillside sells the horizon, at much the same figure. Our agents in Estepona can say which of these schemes has already renewed its flat roofs and which has that still ahead of it, and when the right house is not on the list our property alarm watches the hill for you.