San Pedro de Alcántara, a colony laid out in 1860

San Pedro is the second town of Marbella municipality, sitting west of Puerto Banús and reaching to the mouth of the Guadalmina. It was never a fishing village that grew outwards. It was drawn on paper in 1860, when Manuel Gutiérrez de la Concha, first Marqués del Duero, bought the land and planted sugar cane, and the street plan still shows it: a rectangular grid, rare on this coast, running back from the shore towards the old mill quarter. The practical effect is a place that behaves like a town rather than a resort, with a high street that has a butcher on it.

The stock divides cleanly. Inside the grid it is mostly low-rise apartment building from the 1970s and 1980s, plain in finish, cheap to run, and within a five-minute walk of the market and the health centre. Nueva Alcántara, between the grid and the sea, is newer and better specified. Inland, El Ingenio and El Salto are family barrios of townhouses and modest villas. The expensive stock sits outside the grid altogether, in the beachside estates west of the river. Renovation material is plentiful here, because a great many of those 1980s flats have had one owner since they were built.

The motorway used to cut the town in two. It was buried in June 2012, and the Bulevar de San Pedro Alcántara was laid over the tunnel two years later, which is why the centre now has a kilometre of open ground where six lanes of traffic used to be. The consequence is practical rather than picturesque. The school, the market, the health centre and the beach are on the same side of the road as the flat, so daily life here does not involve crossing a dual carriageway with children. On a Sunday the boulevard fills with prams.

The honest caveat is that San Pedro does not perform. Large parts of the grid are ordinary Spanish apartment building and will never photograph well. The beach is a municipal beach with municipal chiringuitos rather than a beach-club strip, and the western end of town is still catching up with its own promenade. Buyers arriving from Puerto Banús sometimes read all this as a lack of ambition; what it actually is, is a town that has residents in it in February. That is the whole proposition, and it is not for everyone.

Paula's read is that San Pedro is bought by people who have already spent a season on the coast. The first-time buyer chases the sea view; the second-time buyer works out that the school run, the pharmacy and the Thursday market matter more, and comes here. The buyer pool is genuinely mixed — Spanish families, long-settled northern Europeans, and Dutch and Belgian buyers relocating rather than holidaying — which keeps the market liquid in both directions and stops any single nationality setting the tone.

Three layers sit on top of each other. The colonial layer is 1860s: the parish church, built between 1860 and 1866 and burned out in 1936, and the mill buildings that gave El Ingenio its name. The bulk of the housing is 1970s and 1980s four- and five-storey blocks on the grid, brick and render, with generous terraces and small communal pools. The third layer is post-2000 infill and the beachside developments west of the centre, which are contemporary, better insulated and priced accordingly. Detached villas exist, but they sit outside the grid rather than in it.

February is the test, and San Pedro passes it. The market hall, the pharmacies and the restaurants along Calle Marqués del Duero trade all year, because their customers live here. The boulevard is the town's living room: a kilometre of gardens and playgrounds over the tunnel, used from eight in the morning. Children walk to school. The beach is a plain municipal one with a promenade that carries on towards Guadalmina, and the coastal path continues east. Traffic thickens on the roundabouts at each end of the boulevard in August, and only there.

It suits buyers who intend to be here in winter: relocating families who need a school and a doctor within walking distance, retirees who would rather not drive to buy bread, and investors who want long-let tenants instead of eight good summer weeks. It does not suit a buyer whose brief begins with a sea view and a beach club, or anyone who wants a gated perimeter and a guard at the barrier. The grid is an open town, its blocks are ordinary, and nothing about it is exclusive.