Beachfront properties for sale in Marbella

This is the front line of the municipality, and it is the narrowest strip of ground in it. There are 146 properties on it, with € 299,000 at the entry, € 24,000,000 at the top and € 1,300,000 halfway, over an average 202 square metres built. At € 7,968 per square metre, beachfront properties for sale in Marbella stand against € 7,411 for a front-line position across the coast as a whole, and € 5,990 for an ordinary Marbella flat away from the water. The whole premium is bought with a few dozen paces of footpath.

The word is used loosely along this coast, so it is worth being exact about what it means here. In Marbella the front line is the row of buildings with nothing between them and the sand except their own gardens and, in most places, a public promenade.

The first row is a single building deep

Behind that row runs a service street, and behind the street the second row begins — same architecture, same community, a sea view over the roofs in front and a crossing to reach the sand. One street back is a different property at two thirds of the price, and from a photograph taken off a terrace the two can look identical.

How narrow the strip actually is

Marbella has nearly thirty kilometres of coast, and most of it is already built, protected, or occupied by hotels and beach clubs. The residential front line of this municipality is a ribbon one building wide and a few kilometres long in total, broken up by hotels, river mouths and public gardens.

And the footpath is what the money buys

Between a gate on the promenade and a crossing at the coast road lie perhaps four hundred paces, a set of traffic lights and a flight of steps. That distance is the entire difference between the two rows, and it is why the figures above spread as far as they do. Nobody who has carried towels across the A-7 twice a day argues with the premium afterwards.

The first row was built in waves, so the stock on it is mixed: low-rise blocks from the sixties alongside glass and stone from this decade, and a handful of houses between them.

Apartments in the frontline schemes

Most of this list is flats, in low blocks set in gardens between the building and the sand. Two things move the price inside one scheme: the floor and the angle to the water, because a block square to the sea sells differently from one turned a few degrees off it. The wider market is apartments in Marbella.

Penthouses and their roof terraces

A solarium facing open water cannot be added to a finished building, which is why the top floor of a frontline block is a category of its own. A roof terrace on the first row is the one thing on this coast that cannot be retrofitted. The list is at penthouses in Marbella.

Ground floors that open onto the paseo

A garden gate onto the promenade turns a flat into something close to a beach house, and in Marbella those gardens are often large and planted with decades-old trees. The paseo belongs to everyone, and in July everyone is on it, so the planting and the level change between garden and path are what separate one of these from the next.

The frontline villas

They stand on the Golden Mile and on the eastern estates, and there are very few of them. What carries the figure is a plot that cannot be reproduced rather than a house that can, which is why several have been taken down and rebuilt inside their own footprints. See detached villas and, at the very top, luxury property in Marbella.

And the duplexes and townhouses between them

A few of the frontline schemes were built as rows of two-storey houses rather than as blocks, each with a patio at the front and a roof terrace above, sharing the garden and the pool with the flats beside them. A frontline townhouse gives you stairs instead of a lift and a terrace at both ends, and they are gathered at townhouses in Marbella.

The shore is not uniform along the municipality, and the difference between one stretch and the next is visible from the terrace of any building on this list.

Sand in the east, shingle in places further west

From the town eastward the beaches widen into open sand backed by umbrella pines; west of the port they narrow, and some stretches run to coarse sand and shingle between breakwaters. The sand gets wider the further east you go, which is the one rule that holds along the whole municipality.

The promenade runs most of the way

A paved paseo threads along much of the shore, continuous for kilometres in the town and in sections elsewhere, with the municipality extending it a stretch at a time. Where it passes a building on this list, the garden gate opens straight onto it.

Winter storms move the sand about

Easterly weather in autumn and late winter pulls sand off some stretches and piles it onto others, and the authorities replenish parts of the shore before each season. A beach photographed in July is a different width in February, and the breakwaters along the western stretches are there for that reason.

And the beach clubs sit between the schemes

Along the whole front line, restaurants and beach clubs occupy the gaps between residential blocks, most of them open from Easter to autumn and a good number through the winter. Lunch on the sand is a short walk from almost every building on this list, which is a large part of what the position is for.

By district: Puerto Banús, Guadalmina Baja, Los Monteros, Río Real, Elviria, Las Chapas, Artola, Cabopino, El Rosario.

By type: apartments, penthouses, houses, detached villas and luxury property, and the municipality as a whole on property for sale in Marbella. If the level here is beyond what you had planned, the same front line continues west at a fraction of it: the whole coast, Casares and Manilva. Because the best of this stock rarely reaches a portal, the property alarm is worth setting up before you start, and our agents here know which blocks sit square to the water and which do not.