Costa del Sol Property Sales

Daily Telegraph Article September 2007.

Spain's Costa del Sol still has plenty to offer the overseas homebuyer. Zoe Dare Hall finds the best spots unspoilt by development

Even a five-hour delay at Gatwick couldn't dampen the euphoria of pitching up at 4am at my Spanish house last month. Somewhere among the smell of a hot pine and jasmine-scented night, the buzz of crickets and the sight of the mountains in crisp silhouette against a dark blue sky, my mind was transported - quicker than Proust could muse about a Madeleine - back to my first holiday on the Costa del Sol 30 years ago.

My mother first took me there in 1977, when I was five. It was the year of Spain's first democratic elections after nearly four decades of Franco. I recall us watching the new head of state, Juan Carlos, on television, thinking he seemed very nice and down-to-earth for a king. I rode a donkey through the backstreets of Mijas, tasted wine (or maybe something more child-friendly) poured from a great height from a long-stemmed porrón. And I sat on the roof tiles of the whitewashed house we rented in the village of Torreblanca, looking across empty fields towards one or two isolated tower blocks on the coast.

Five years ago, soon after my mother died, I drove back to try to find that house. I couldn't even find Torreblanca. Eventually, I tracked it down, engulfed by the sprawl of Fuengirola, our white house now unidentifiable among hundreds of others. Yet the pull to return has always been there. The coast feels like a second home in the truest sense. Stepping out at Málaga airport - currently in the throes of vast expansion - is as familiar to me as entering my local train station in London. And despite vast changes on the Costa del Sol over the past 30 years, some things remain reassuringly the same.

Today, that donkey's descendants are still hulking tourists around Mijas, the backstreets unchanged from when I was a child. Except back then, you would have been a pioneer if you had headed into the old town and handed over £5,000 for an old townhouse. Now, you can choose from scores of agents to sell you a similar house for about £150,000 or a nearby villa for a few million. The average property on the coast now costs £213,000 - the same as in Britain.

And Fuengirola, the resort where Spanish mass tourism began, has become a magnet for all who visit the coast. Many of those among the influx of package holidaymakers in the 1960s and 1970s joined the first mass influx of British migrants looking to retire to the sun in the 1980s.