One Year Without the Golden Visa: What Actually Happened in Marbella

Price data: Idealista price series, through June 2026. Buyer data: Spanish Property Registrars (Colegio de Registradores), 2025 yearbook.

On 3 April 2025, Spain closed its golden visa: the scheme that since 2013 had offered residency to non-EU buyers investing €500,000 or more in Spanish property. The commentary wrote itself. Foreign demand would cool, the top of the market would wobble, and the areas most loved by international buyers, with Marbella first among them, would feel it most.

It is now July 2026, and we can stop speculating, because the data is in. This is what actually happened.

The golden visa granted residency to non-EU nationals investing €500,000 or more in Spanish real estate, alongside other investment routes. Organic Law 1/2025 removed those provisions with effect from 3 April 2025. Applications filed before the cut-off were processed under the old rules, and investors who already held the visa kept it, with renewals protected under transitional arrangements.

In other words: nothing was taken away from anyone who had it. What ended was the option for new buyers to convert a property purchase into a residence permit.

The concern was not unreasonable on its face, and it was widely voiced in industry commentary at the time: the visa had been closely associated with exactly the kind of buyer this coast attracts, international, mobile, purchasing at the top of the market. Around 14,500 non-EU investors and their families had used the route over its lifetime.

The prediction, in effect, was a testable one. If a meaningful share of demand depended on the residency perk, two things should have shown up in the data within a year: fewer foreign buyers, especially non-EU buyers in the €500,000-plus bracket the visa was built around, and softening prices in the international markets, with Marbella first among them.

Both predictions failed, and not narrowly.

Foreign buyers did not retreat; they set a record. According to the Spanish Property Registrars' 2025 yearbook, foreigners purchased close to 97,500 homes in Spain in 2025, the highest figure ever recorded. In Málaga province, the heart of the Costa del Sol, foreign buyers accounted for 32.8% of all transactions, the second-highest share of any province in Spain. And in the precise segment the golden visa was built around, purchases above €500,000, the foreign share passed 12% for the first time on record, with non-EU nationals, the only group the visa ever applied to, making up 47% of those buyers.

Prices tell the same story. In the month the visa ended, the average asking price in Marbella stood at €5,135/m². Fourteen months later it stands at €5,608/m², an all-time high, up 9.2% since the abolition and 7.6% in the year to June 2026 (Idealista). Estepona rose 10.8% over the same year, and within Marbella the prime zones led rather than lagged: Nagüeles-Milla de Oro rose 8.0% year on year and Río Real-Los Monteros 10.4%.

One honest footnote: the foreign share of the total Spanish market slipped slightly, from almost 15% at its 2023 peak to 13.8%, because domestic demand grew even faster. Fewer foreign buyers in relative terms, more than ever in absolute ones, and records exactly where the visa's removal should have hurt most. That is not what an exodus looks like.

The explanation is simpler than the commentary suggested: most of the buyers driving this market never needed the visa in the first place.

Look at who actually buys here. The three largest groups of foreign buyers in Spain in 2025 were the British, Germans and Dutch (Property Registrars). Germans and Dutch are EU citizens who hold the right to live in Spain regardless; no visa scheme ever applied to them. The British, the largest group and the leading foreign buyers in Andalucía, largely use their homes within the standard travel allowances or qualify through routes that never depended on a property purchase. And the equity-driven, lifestyle-first character of this cycle, which we described in our budget guide, was never about paperwork.

In our own practice the pattern was the same: the golden visa came up in conversations, but it was rarely the reason a purchase happened. Marbella sells a way of living. It turns out that was always the product; the visa was an accessory.

None of this means residency stopped mattering; it means property purchase alone no longer provides it. Non-EU buyers who want to live in Spain full-time now look to routes such as the non-lucrative visa, aimed at buyers with passive income, or the digital nomad visa for remote workers, each with income requirements that are updated regularly. Which route fits, and whether it fits, is a question for an immigration specialist, and we are happy to introduce you to the ones our clients work with.

For everyone else, nothing changed at all: EU citizens never needed a visa, and non-resident owners can use their Spanish home exactly as before.

We work with international buyers from first orientation to completion, including the questions that sit around the purchase: financing timelines, rental rules, and the right specialists for tax and residency. If your plans involve more than the property itself, contact us and we will make sure the right experts are at the table from the start.

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