La Reserva de Sotogrande, the estate's lagoon and racquet quarter

La Reserva is what Sotogrande built when it had already been Sotogrande for forty years. It occupies the high ground behind the estate, the largest of its sectors by area, and it was developed with a clubhouse-first logic that the original 1960s streets never had: the golf came in 2003, the racquet courts in 2017, and the beach lagoon opened for the summer of 2018. The result is a part of the estate that behaves like a private resort, with the facilities arriving before most of the houses rather than long afterwards.

The built stock is small in number and large in scale. Individual villas sit on hillside plots taking the view down the valley towards the sea, most of them contemporary — flat roofs, deep glazing, pale stone, level changes handled with terraces. Alongside them the sector carries named schemes of a kind Sotogrande's older half does not have: apartment and townhouse developments set in landscaped parkland, of which Village Verde, with a hundred and twenty-four apartments across six hectares, is the clearest example. Serviced plots are still sold here, which is rare in the corridor.

Day to day, life is club-shaped. The lagoon carries the summer, the tennis and padel courts carry the shoulder seasons, and the golf runs through the winter when the hillside is green. Nothing is walkable: everything, including the club itself, is a short drive, and the port and the beach are on the far side of the A-7. That, plus a cost base that reflects gated infrastructure, a conservation entity and club membership on top of a comunidad, is the honest caveat. Against it, this is the top of the corridor's ladder and the only part of it still producing new-build at scale.

Overwhelmingly contemporary, and unusually coherent because most of it went up inside two decades. Detached houses read as horizontal volumes in pale stone and render, with flat roofs, full-height glazing turned down the valley, infinity pools and terracing to absorb the slope. The apartment and townhouse schemes are lower and more landscape-led, set into parkland with generous terraces rather than balconies, generous garage provision and communal gardens between blocks rather than around them. There is essentially no period stock and very little to renovate. What there is instead, rarely for this corridor, is serviced land: plots sold ready to build on.

Everything is booked and everything is driven to. The summer runs on the lagoon and its restaurants; the shoulder seasons run on tennis, padel and the six-a-side pitch; winter runs on golf, because the hillside is green in February when the coast is bleached. Children's activities are organised through the club rather than found in a village. There are no shops, no bars outside the club and no promenade; the supermarket is down in Pueblo Nuevo de Guadiaro and dinner out usually means the port. The sound is birds, sprinklers and, in season, tennis.

It suits a buyer who wants a new or nearly new house at the top of this market, who values a private club with a lagoon and racquet courts more than a marina berth, and who intends to use the facilities rather than merely own beside them. Families with young children do particularly well. It does not suit anyone who wants to walk to dinner, wants the sea within sight from the door, dislikes paying a club subscription on top of estate and community charges, or is looking for period character rather than contemporary building.