The Golf Valley, from Las Brisas to the Saturday bullring

Nueva Andalucía began as a development, not a village. José Banús laid it out before he built the marina that carries his name, and the golf came almost immediately: Las Brisas opened in 1968 to a Robert Trent Jones design, Los Naranjos followed in 1977 with the same architect, and Aloha took its first drive on 25 October 1975 on Javier Arana's last course. Three championship layouts inside one valley is unusual anywhere, and it is the single fact that shapes everything else about how the area is built and priced.

The stock follows the fairways. Around the courses are detached villas on generous, gently sloping plots, many built between the late 1970s and the 1990s in a heavy Andalusian idiom — arches, terracotta, deep loggias — and now steadily being replaced or gutted for contemporary interiors. Between them sit two- and three-storey gated apartment complexes with pools and gardens, which is the valley's most liquid product. Higher up, towards the mountain, plots grow and views open. There is no dense old core anywhere in the valley.

It runs as a residential district rather than a resort. The Saturday market around the old bullring is the weekly event, Centro Plaza carries the everyday shops, and the international schools and the padel and tennis clubs mean the streets are busy on a Tuesday in November as well as in August. The beach is a five-minute drive rather than a walk, and the marina at Puerto Banús is close enough to use and far enough to sleep through. Traffic thickens at school run and at the Banús exit.

The honest caveat is that living beside a golf course is a real set of trade-offs, not just a view. Boundary plots carry stray balls, early irrigation and course machinery from first light, and a fairway view is only as permanent as the club that maintains it. Access roads within the valley are narrow and were designed for far fewer cars. And because Marbella's 2010 general plan was annulled in 2015, an older villa here with added floors or a converted basement deserves a full licence search rather than a reassuring answer.

The valley reads as three overlapping decades. The late 1970s and 1980s produced the heavy Andalusian villa — thick walls, arched galleries, terracotta roofs, interior patios — usually single or two storey and set well back on its plot. The 1990s added gated apartment complexes of two and three storeys with communal pools, still the most common product. Since 2010 the same plots have been coming back as flat-roofed contemporary houses with glazed south elevations. Renovation stock is abundant: the 1980s villas are structurally sound and internally dated, which is a workable combination.

The valley sounds like sprinklers at six and children at eight. Saturday morning is the market around the old bullring; the rest of the week runs on Centro Plaza, the padel courts and the school gates. People eat locally rather than on the quayside, and a good part of the restaurant trade is open in January because the customers live here. Nothing is walkable in the town-centre sense — the streets are wide and residential and built around cars — but journeys are short, and the beach and the marina are both under ten minutes when the traffic behaves.

It suits a family or a couple who want to live in Spain rather than visit it: a house with a garden, neighbours in February, schools and a supermarket within ten minutes, and Puerto Banús close enough for a Friday without living inside it. It does not suit anyone who wants to walk to the sea, or who wants a walkable Spanish town centre with a plaza and a church — the valley has neither. Golfers who never play will also find themselves paying for fairways they only look at.