Marbella Club Hotel Golf Resort & Spa

Marbella Club Hotel Golf Resort & Spa

The Costa del Sol and the Golden Mile are not the same place, though they share a coastline. The Golden Mile, the six-kilometre strip running between Marbella's old town and Puerto Banús, predates the development that defined the rest of the coast, and Marbella Club Hotel, which created it, has been the reason to understand the distinction since 1954. That year Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe opened the old fig and olive grove known as Finca Santa Margarita to guests, in a collection of low-slung whitewashed bungalows modelled, self-deprecatingly, on American motels he had seen on his travels. Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery, and most of the mid-century jet set arrived in short order. The road running past the hotel is named after him now. What the hotel has kept across seven decades is its essential character: Andalusian village scale, terracotta roofs, whitewashed walls threaded with bougainvillea that has had fifty years to spread, and gardens where the palms and pines Prince Alfonso imported from Mexico in the early years have matured into something genuinely extraordinary. It is not grand in the way a Riviera palace is grand. It is easy, social, and unhurried, and it suits guests who want their luxury to feel lived-in rather than performed. Rooms and suites open onto private terraces overlooking the gardens or the sea, marble bathrooms have soaking tubs in upgraded categories, and the beach club palapa, a thatched structure that has become a small landmark on the Paseo Marítimo, is where most of the day happens. The Grill operates under mature olive trees and pine canopy with pressed linen, and is now run by the son of the hotel's original grill chef. Rudi's, named after the hotel's legendary first general manager Count Rudolf von Schönburg, has the atmosphere of somewhere that knows its own history without needing to announce it. The thalassotherapy spa faces the sea, the 18-hole golf course was designed by Dave Thomas, and the equestrian center offers rides into the Sierra Blanca hills with Gibraltar visible in the distance. The Kids Club at 5,000 square metres is among the most extensive in Europe, which means families and those travelling without children both find what they came for without much overlap. The guests who return here year after year are not people who would go anywhere else on this coast. They are here because this particular hotel, in this particular pocket, has spent seventy years becoming irreplaceable. The short version: The hotel that created the Golden Mile and, with it, the only part of the Costa del Sol worth the argument. Founded in 1954 by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe on a fig grove on the Andalusian coast, now ten acres of mature subtropical gardens with 115 rooms and suites, 16 villas, a seafront thalassotherapy spa, an 18-hole golf course, and a beach club ease that has been drawing the same discerning guests back for decades. Leading Hotels of the World.