Estepona's old town, read from the Torre del Reloj down

Estepona's old town is a working town centre, not a quarter preserved for visitors. Behind the seafront runs a grid of narrow whitewashed streets that the Ayuntamiento has spent a decade taking cars out of: more than 130 of them are now pedestrian, relaid in stone and hung with flowerpots under the municipal Jardín de la Costa del Sol programme. The Torre del Reloj still marks the hours from the middle of it, left standing alone after the 1755 earthquake ruined the church it belonged to. The bakery queue at eight in the morning is local, and stays local in November.

Stock here is old and small before it is anything else. Two- and three-storey houses on plots measured in a handful of metres, patios rather than gardens, and roof terraces that are the real outdoor room. Above them sit low apartment blocks from the 1960s and 1970s along the Avenida de España and the streets behind the Plaza de las Flores, most of them without a lift. Renovated units and untouched ones sit on the same street, and the difference between them is usually plumbing, insulation and whether the roof terrace was ever legalised.

Life runs on foot and it runs all year. Calle Real carries the daily traffic of the town rather than the tourist traffic — pharmacy, ironmonger, the fish shop, three generations of the same family at a table outside. The Ruta de Murales Artísticos has put 64 painted façades across the town, which changes the feel of an ordinary residential block more than a guidebook can explain. February is quiet but it is not shut: the restaurants on the Plaza de las Flores stay open, the promenade fills at six, and the municipal Orchidarium keeps its doors open through the winter.

The honest caveat is access. A pedestrianised centre is a pleasure to live in and a nuisance to arrive at. Deliveries, removals and anything involving a van need planning, residents' parking is a separate transaction from the flat, and a fourth-floor walk-up is a decision about the next twenty years, not the next two. Buildings this age also carry the ordinary Spanish problems of shared drains, party walls and a comunidad de propietarios whose reserve fund may be thinner than the roof it is meant to cover.

Paula's read on the market is that the centre trades on being genuinely inhabited. Buyers who come here have usually already looked at the beachfront strips further east and decided against them. Demand is steady rather than seasonal, because the same qualities that make a house here work in July make it work in January. The constraint is supply: the old town has a fixed footprint, nothing new is built inside it, and a good renovated house on a wide street is a rarer thing than the volume of listings west of the port suggests.

The core is pre-industrial: single-aisle houses of two or three storeys, load-bearing walls, small windows, a patio and a flat roof used as a terrace. Around it sit the town's first apartment blocks, mostly 1960s and 1970s, four or five storeys, balconies to the street, and stairs rather than lifts. Very little is contemporary; where it is, it is a gutted shell behind a protected façade. Renovation stock is plentiful and honest — the walls are sound and everything inside them, from wiring to drainage, is usually the project.

Mornings belong to the market and the bakeries; the town eats late and eats out on the Plaza de las Flores and the streets around it. The school run is short and mostly on foot, because the state schools are inside the town rather than on a bypass. Sound is the thing people underestimate: a pedestrianised street carries voices, chairs and rubbish lorries, and a bar terrace under a bedroom window is audible until well after midnight in August. In February the promenade still fills at six, the Orchidarium stays open, and the restaurants that matter never closed.

It suits people who want a Spanish town rather than a coastal address: year-round residents, buyers who intend to speak Spanish, and anyone whose ideal Saturday is on foot. It does not suit a family that needs two parking spaces and a garden, a buyer who wants a pool without a shared roof terrace, or anyone with knees that will not want four flights in a decade. If your shortlist is really about beach frontage and a private plot, the centre will disappoint you and one of the strips east of the port will not.