The Golden Mile, from Hohenlohe's boulevard to the sand

The Golden Mile is not an administrative district and has no boundary you could draw on a cadastral map. It is a stretch of coast running west from the edge of Marbella town towards Puerto Banús, and it exists because Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe opened the Marbella Club there in 1954. Everything that followed grew along one road, which the street signs still call Bulevar Príncipe Alfonso von Hohenlohe. Ask three residents where the strip begins and you will get three answers — the honest one is that it begins where the walls start.

Two markets sit under one name. Between the road and the sand are walled villa estates and low-rise gated blocks — Casablanca, Santa Margarita, the residences attached to Puente Romano — on plots that are generous, mature and finite, with almost nothing new released. North of the road the land climbs and the stock changes: hillside villas, contemporary rebuilds, longer views, and a walk to the beach that is really a drive. Both halves are advertised under the same two words, which is why the first question about any listing here is which side of the road it sits on.

Day to day the strip is unusually walkable for Marbella, and that is much of the appeal. The paseo runs its whole length; the Marbella Club and Puente Romano stay open all year and end up doing duty as the neighbourhood's restaurant, gym and Sunday lunch; the Ralli museum sits at the western end in Coral Beach and charges nothing to enter. February is quiet rather than shut. What the strip does not have is a Spanish high street — for a supermarket run, a bank or a hardware shop you drive into Marbella or down to Puerto Banús.

The honest caveat is the road itself. The A-7 runs through the middle, and it separates a five-minute barefoot walk from a crossing nobody makes with a small child. Then there is the planning history: the 2010 general plan was annulled by the Tribunal Supremo, Spain's supreme court, in 2015, and the 1986 plan governs again. On a strip this old, with this many extensions, terraces and pool houses added over seventy years, the licence record of a specific house is worth a lawyer's morning rather than a glance at the brochure.

Three eras overlap on the same strip. The 1950s and 1960s left low, deeply shaded, whitewashed Andalusian villas on wide plots, several still standing behind their original walls. The 1970s and 1980s added gated blocks of two or three storeys with communal gardens and generous terraces. Since the 2000s the hillside above the road has filled with contemporary, glass-fronted houses. Renovation stock is genuinely available on the beach side, where the value often sits in the land and its permissions rather than in the house currently standing on it.

The sound of the Golden Mile is the A-7 on one side and the sea on the other, and your address decides which one you hear at night. Eating out is hotel-led rather than plaza-led: Leña sits inside Puente Romano, the tennis club runs all year, the beach clubs open well before Easter. The school run goes outward, because the international schools are in San Pedro, Nueva Andalucía and east Marbella — which means a car and a slot on the A-7 twice a day. Walking, though, is real here: the paseo carries you the whole length of the strip.

It suits a buyer who wants Marbella's most established address and will pay for maturity rather than newness: gardens that took forty years to grow, hotels that never close, a paseo instead of a car journey. It does not suit anyone who wants a village square, neighbours who are home in November, or a garden a child can be let loose in without a gate between them and a fast road. Nor does it suit a value hunter — nothing on this strip is quietly underpriced.