Top floor apartments for sale in Marbella

In the most expensive municipality on this coast, a top floor is the cheapest way to buy height. Top floor apartments for sale in Marbella ask € 5,313 per square metre — against € 5,888 for a middle floor here and € 6,765 for a penthouse. The band holds 37 flats, the cheapest at € 290,000 and the dearest at € 2,400,000, the middle of them at € 535,000, averaging 122 square metres of floor area.

The highest flat in the building, with nobody living overhead and no private roof terrace. A top floor with a solarium on it would be a penthouse and would cost half again. It does not have one, and in this municipality that single distinction is worth more money than anywhere else on the coast — which is precisely what makes the band interesting.

Why they are the cheapest of the upper floors

Because buyers search for things with names. A garden flat and a penthouse each have a feature you can type into a search box; a top floor has the absence of one. Fewer searches reach this band than any other, and the figures at the head of this page are the consequence. In a municipality where every other band is bid up by international demand, that is an unusual gap to find.

What you get for the money

Light from above the rooflines rather than across the neighbours' terraces. Nobody walking about overhead, which on tiled Spanish floors matters more than buyers expect. Distance from the pool, the gate and the communal paths, so the quietest flat in the scheme. And frequently the best outlook in the building at the lowest price in it, because the penthouse above has gone to somebody paying for the roof.

And what you are declining

The solarium, and nothing else. If a private roof terrace is central to how you intend to live, buy one and pay for it — it cannot be added to a finished building and it holds value through every turn of this market. See penthouses in Marbella, decide honestly which of the two you are, and if the answer is that you would use a roof terrace twice a summer, this page is where the sensible purchase is.

A pitched roof and a flat slab are two different properties

A pitched tiled roof over a ventilated void behaves nothing like a flat slab built to the standards of forty years ago. Under the first, a top floor is barely warmer than the flat below it. Under the second, in August, it is the hottest room in the building and the air conditioning works all day to hold it. The roof construction is the single biggest difference between two identical-looking flats in this band, and it is the one thing a photograph of a terrace can never show.

The water tanks and the lift motor live up here as well

Everything mechanical in a Spanish block goes on the roof or into the last stairwell: the storage tanks, the pressure pump, the lift motor, the aerials, and on the newer schemes the solar panels and the cooling plant. That puts the machinery of the whole building directly over or beside this band and nowhere else in it. In a well-built scheme it is inaudible; in a thin one a hum carries through the back bedroom wall, and it is louder in August than on a quiet February morning, because that is when the plant is working.

On the top floor the terrace frequently runs the width of the façade

This is the compensation, and in the mature beachside blocks it is a large one. The highest floor of a long low Marbella building was often set back, which gave it the deepest terrace in the scheme, with the roof slab above only part of it and open sky over the rest. A set-back top floor has the best terrace in the building without owning the roof, and the schemes along the shore between the town and Puerto Banús are where to look for it. The frontline ones appear under beachfront in Marbella.

The estates along the shore, and the Golden Mile

The dearest and the most interesting: mature schemes between the town and Puerto Banús where the gardens have had half a century to grow. Those of them that stand directly on the sand appear under beachfront in Marbella as well.

The golf valley

Behind the marina, on sloping ground, where a top floor looks over the fairways to the sea beyond — and where the slope means the flats below it see a good deal of the same thing. The flats of the valley have their own page under Nueva Andalucía, with the schemes on the courses themselves under golf property in Marbella.

Marbella East

Low-density schemes among the pine woods from Los Monteros out to Cabopino, with the widest beaches in the municipality and the international schools inland. The eastern estates give you more floor area for the money than any other part of Marbella. Start from Elviria and Los Monteros.

San Pedro and the town

The affordable end. In the town a top floor is an urban flat with the rooftops for a view, and the whole place on foot at the bottom of the stairs. Those two districts are set out at San Pedro de Alcántara and, at the opposite end of the price scale, Puerto Banús.

A Marbella urbanisation is a small settlement behind one gate

Almost nothing in this band stands on a public street. The flat sits in a scheme with its own name, its own roads, its own barrier and in the larger ones its own guard, and what lies inside the wall is gardens, one pool or several, parking under the buildings, and a path to each block. The scheme behind the gate is as much of the purchase as the flat itself, and two urbanisations a hundred metres apart can be run to entirely different standards.

The planting between the blocks is the oldest on this coast

Marbella began planting its urbanisations half a century ago and then watered them, which is why the municipality reads green from the road where much of the coast does not. Avenues of jacaranda that flower purple in May, ficus with trunks a metre across, cypress hedges along the boundaries, palms down the drives and irrigated lawn between the buildings. None of it can be bought ready-made in a new scheme, and it is a substantial part of why an older address here holds its price.

From this floor you look down on the whole of it

The ground floor sees the hedge in front of it and the middle floors see the tops of the trees. The top floor sees the layout: the pool, the lawns, the roofs of the blocks in front and whatever lies past them, which on the valley slope is a fairway and on the shore is water. It is also far enough above the paths for the scheme to be quiet, which the floors below are not in August.

Paddle courts and gyms arrived with the nineties schemes

What a Marbella urbanisation contains depends on when it was drawn. The sixties and seventies estates were gardens, a pool and a gate, and that is all they were ever meant to be. The nineties added paddle courts, a gym and sometimes a social room; this century added underground parking for every flat, a second pool kept warm through the winter and, in the upper market, a concierge at the entrance.

In the eastern estates the pine woods do the work of a garden

From Los Monteros out towards Cabopino the schemes were set into existing umbrella pine rather than planted from bare ground, so the trees are older than the buildings and stand between the blocks rather than along the drives. It is the one part of the municipality that smells of resin in July instead of cut grass, and it is why families who have looked at the whole coast so often stop there. The district lists start at Las Chapas and Cabopino.

The neighbouring levels in the same blocks: a penthouse where the roof terrace is the whole point, a middle floor where choice matters more than height, the ground floor where the answer is a garden. Every flat in the municipality, on every level, is gathered under apartments in Marbella.

If what you actually want is nobody on any side of you, the step up is a townhouse, and past that a house of your own; the whole municipality together is on property for sale in Marbella. West of here the same height costs a good deal less, and up in the hills the slope hands you the view for nothing: top floor apartments across the coast and Benahavís. Since new build is almost absent from this band, the modern alternatives are on new developments, and the property alarm will reach you before a portal search does.