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The Garden of the Costa del Sol

Living in Estepona

Estepona has held onto what much of the coast has lost: a working old town, a real fishing port, and a sense of pace set by neighbours rather than visitors. It is also one of the fastest growing areas on the coast within the housing market. Over the past decade the municipality has planted more than 25,000 trees, painted over fifty large-scale murals onto the old quarter's walls, and rebuilt a 23-kilometre seafront promenade that now runs almost unbroken from Guadalmansa to the marina. The result is the only town on the western Costa del Sol that still feels like an Andalusian pueblo at its core, with a contemporary residential belt growing quietly around it.

• The old town is a maze of white streets where every corner has flowers and every other wall has a painting. Plaza de las Flores is still the heart of the town, lined with bars run by the same families for generations. Mornings start at the market on Calle Castillo; evenings end on the seafront, watching the fishing boats come back in.
• Between Estepona town and San Pedro de Alcántara stretches the so-called New Golden Mile, fifteen kilometres of beachfront developments, boutique hotels and gated communities. This is where most of the contemporary residential market sits, with new-build apartments from €450,000, frontline-beach villas from €4M, and the most exclusive enclaves of Los Flamingos and El Paraíso reaching well past €15M. Land prices have risen roughly 14% year on year, the strongest growth on the western coast.
• Schools cluster along the New Golden Mile, with Atalaya Colegio, Mayfair International Academy and Colegio San José all within fifteen minutes. Healthcare is anchored by the private Hospiten Estepona and the public Hospital Costa del Sol just east, with Quirónsalud Marbella twenty minutes along the coast. Golf is the quiet headline here: more than fifteen courses inside the municipality, including Finca Cortesín, Villa Padierna's three courses, El Paraíso, Atalaya and Estepona Golf, the highest concentration of fairways anywhere in Europe.