Fuengirola, from Castillo Sohail to Los Boliches

Fuengirola is the working town of this stretch of coast rather than a resort attached to one. The Río Fuengirola splits it in two: Castillo Sohail stands on the hill above the river mouth, and the grid of streets that grew out of the old fishing settlement runs east and north from there. Los Boliches, once its own village, is now simply the northern half of the same continuous town, while Torreblanca and Los Pacos climb the hillside behind it. Gated schemes exist on those slopes, but the town itself is open street after open street.

Stock here is apartments, and mostly apartments from the boom decades. The seafront blocks went up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, tall and close-packed, and much of what changes hands today is a reworked flat inside one of them. Behind the front, the streets fill with later infill from the eighties and nineties. Villas exist, but they are pushed up onto the Torreblanca and Los Pacos slopes on plots that are modest by Marbella standards. Genuine new build is scarce, because very little unbuilt land is left inside the municipal boundary.

Life runs on foot and on the train. The promenade is the town's main street as much as the shopping avenues are, and the walk from the castle end to Los Boliches takes an hour at a stroll. October brings the Feria del Rosario, the town's own fiesta for its patron; April brings the Feria Internacional de los Pueblos, a week of country pavilions on the fairground. Neither is a tourist invention. In February the terraces are thinner but the same bars are open, which is the practical difference between a town and a resort.

The honest caveat is density. Fuengirola is built close, and a flat facing an interior patio in July hears everything the patio hears. Parking near the front is genuinely difficult, and a deeded space changes what a home is worth to live in rather than to visit. The beaches are wide, busy town beaches, not the pine-backed coves further west. And a building from the boom years can look renovated inside while its comunidad de propietarios — the owners' association — has an unresolved façade or lift budget behind it. Read the minutes, not the photographs.

Paula's read is that Fuengirola is bought for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. One buyer wants the year-round town and the train, and will trade a sea view for a lift, a garage and a butcher downstairs. The other wants a front-line letting flat and cares about the beach and little else. The second group competes hardest for the same small number of buildings, and that is where the pressure in this market sits. Anything a street or two back is a calmer purchase and, for most people, the better home.

Fuengirola is an apartment town, and its skyline records exactly when this coast was developed. Long blocks from the nineteen-sixties and seventies line the seafront; behind them come denser eighties and nineties infill, then a scatter of recent replacement buildings on cleared plots. Andalusian vernacular survives only in fragments, around the old streets near the river and in Pueblo López. Villas are hillside stock in Torreblanca and Los Pacos, on modest plots. Renovation material is abundant and is the real opportunity here: sound structures, dated bathrooms, and communities that have deferred work for a decade.

February is the test and Fuengirola passes it: the covered market, the chemists and most kitchens stay open, and the promenade is busier at eleven on a winter morning than many towns are in August. Families use the schools and the Bioparc; older residents use the promenade benches. Traffic funnels onto a handful of avenues and crawls at school times. The sound of the place is Spanish at street level with Finnish alongside it — the Escuela Finlandesa de la Costa del Sol has taught here since 1991, and Los Boliches carries Finnish shopfronts to prove it.

It suits buyers who want a Spanish town rather than an enclave: people who will use the train to Málaga, walk to the covered market, and be content in an apartment. It suits year-round living, and it suits letting. It does not suit anyone who wants a plot, silence, or a gated perimeter with its own gardens — those buyers belong on the hillside at El Higuerón, or further west entirely. Nor does it suit anyone who needs to park a second car anywhere near the beach.