El Padrón, where a 1575 watchtower stands in a hotel garden

El Padrón is short — you can walk its length in a few minutes — and that brevity is the whole proposition. This is one of the few stretches on the New Golden Mile where housing, sand and somewhere to eat sit on the same side of the coast road. The beach is one of nine Estepona counts in its eastern zone, a roster running from Punta de la Plata to Casasola, and the municipality describes El Padrón itself as very calm on weekdays. Behind it, in a hotel garden, a watchtower raised in 1575 is still standing.

The stock reflects a strip built out plot by plot rather than planned in one go. Front-line blocks of three and four storeys look straight at the water, most of them from the 1990s and 2000s, with parking below, a communal pool and a gate. Behind them run townhouse rows and a handful of villas that give up the direct view but keep the walk. There is very little here that is genuinely old and very little that is genuinely large. What is rare, and priced as such, is a terrace with nothing able to be built in front of it.

Life here is seasonal in a way the inland addresses are not. In summer the beach village behind the sand is busy from lunch until late; by February much of it has closed and the promenade belongs to walkers and dogs. The honest caveats are salt, noise and the road: a front-line building needs constant maintenance, an August evening above a beach terrace is not quiet, and getting anywhere else means joining the A-7. Paula's read is that El Padrón is bought for one thing — water in front of you, permanently — and that everything else is arranged around it.

Almost everything is a communal building. The front line is three and four storeys of rendered block with deep, wide balconies designed to be the main room in summer, mostly from the 1990s and 2000s, with garages below and gardens between the buildings and the sand. Behind it, townhouse rows step down towards the beach in a tiled-roof Andalusian idiom, and a small number of detached houses sit on the inland edge. Contemporary work appears as full apartment refurbishment rather than as new blocks, because there is almost no free land left on this side of the road.

The sound is the sea, and after that the coast road. The beach village behind the sand runs on a summer clock — long lunches, music until late, a market that appears in season — and quietens sharply once the visitors go. What remains in winter is the promenade, and it is genuinely used: this is walking country in January, when the sand is empty and the light is good. For a supermarket, a school or a doctor you drive inland or into Estepona. Parking near the front is the daily irritation, and August is worse than anyone admits.

It suits buyers whose requirement is the water itself: owners who want to swim before breakfast, couples downsizing from a villa, and letting owners who need the words first line to do their marketing for them. It does not suit a family wanting a garden and a private pool, a buyer after a Spanish neighbourhood with a square and a school, or anyone who resents maintenance — the sea that sells the flat is also the thing corroding the railings, and the community budget shows it.