Apartments for sale in Nueva Andalucía

The same money buys a great deal more floor here than on the first line, and a five-minute drive instead of a gate onto the sand. Whether that trade is worth it is the one question only you can answer — but it is the question, and it is worth answering before you look at a single listing.

Ground floor, with the garden

The ground floor brings its own patch of garden, usually with a gate opening towards the pool, and in this valley it asks a little more per square metre than the floor above it. The margin is slim, and the figure understates the band anyway, because a garden is not built area and never enters the calculation. What the ground floor really buys is the outside space. Our ground floor apartments in Marbella show how thin that gap is across the wider municipality.

Middle floor, the way in

The middle floor is the cheapest way into a given address, with the same pool, the same gardens and the same outlook as the flats above and below. What goes missing is the piece of garden below and the roof above. Where the address counts for more than the open air, this is the place to begin — and across the municipality that list is middle floor apartments in Marbella.

Penthouses, the floor that cannot be added

A roof terrace cannot be built onto a finished block, which is why the top floor leads the valley and holds its price through every cycle. Nueva Andalucía carries an unusually large share of them, single-storey and duplex, because so much of it was built low. The municipal list is penthouses in Marbella.

Half a century of building stands side by side in this valley, and the decade a scheme was drawn in shows up in the things a photograph never records: ceiling height, wall thickness, the depth of a terrace, the width of a lift. The decade a scheme was drawn in decides how a flat feels before any of the fittings do.

The first generation, low and white

The earliest urbanisations here went up as Andalusian villages in miniature: two and three storeys, whitewashed walls, arched loggias, tiled stairs, and gardens planted when the land around them was still cheap. Rooms are smaller than a modern plan allows and the kitchens were drawn for staff rather than for guests. What these schemes have instead is mature planting, generous ground between the blocks, and terraces set into the building rather than hung off the front of it.

The golf schemes of the nineties

Once the three courses had matured, the building followed them: larger blocks behind gates, underground parking, lifts that reach the garage, heated pools, gardens laid out for the view rather than for shade. Flats from this period carry the layout most buyers now take for granted — one open living room, a long covered terrace, a bathroom for every bedroom — and they make up the bulk of what changes hands in the valley in any given year.

The rebuilds and the infill

Since the valley filled up, new flats have arrived two ways: a tired block taken down and replaced on its own plot, and the last corners of the older urbanisations finally built out. Both tend to be small schemes of a dozen homes rather than a hundred, which is why they rarely carry the facilities of the nineties estates. What they do carry is insulation, glazing and shading drawn for this climate rather than retrofitted into it.

The listing describes the flat. What decides whether you use it is the valley around it, and the valley changes character four times a year.

The slope decides the afternoon

Nueva Andalucía runs north from the coast across a hillside, which means two flats in the same block can have completely different days. A terrace facing south or south-west stays warm into the evening from April to October; one facing the hill behind is pleasant in August and cool by the middle of October. A terrace photographed at noon says nothing about where the shade falls at four, and nothing in a listing records it either.

Winter in the valley

From November the courses stay busy and the restaurants beside them stay open, while the beach cafés below shut for a month or two. The valley is one of the few parts of Marbella no quieter in February than in June, because the people who come here come to play rather than to swim. Winter here is a working season rather than a closed one, and it shows in whether a scheme's pool is heated and whether its gardeners are on site.

The walk, the car and the Saturday market

This is a valley of urbanisations rather than a town: a supermarket on one road, a cluster of restaurants on another, the shops of San Pedro de Alcántara a ten-minute run down the hill, and the marina barely half that in the opposite direction. On Saturday mornings a street market sets up around the bullring in the middle of the district, which is the nearest thing the valley has to a town square. Anyone expecting to walk to a bakery should look at San Pedro de Alcántara instead, where that life exists.

The rest of the valley

Everything here, houses and land included, is on property for sale in Nueva Andalucía. If you want space rather than a scheme, see houses in Nueva Andalucía or the villas on their own plots; if the course is the point, the golf property is collected separately, and if you would rather build, the plots are there too.

The same type elsewhere on this coast

Across the municipality the same type is apartments for sale in Marbella, which takes in the beachside blocks, the Golden Mile and the eastern shelf as well as this valley. Down the coast, where the same budget buys more floor, the list is apartments in Estepona; inland and higher, with longer views and a mountain road, Benahavís. Seeing two of those on the same day settles more than a week of reading.

If nothing above is right yet

Flats come onto this list most weeks, and the ones that suit several kinds of buyer at once go before many people have seen them. Setting the criteria once beats refreshing a list: our property alarm mails you the morning something matches. Tell us the floor, the aspect and the kind of scheme you have in mind, and we will watch the valley for it.