New flights, busy fairways and a professional tournament to close the season: Spain’s southern coast is learning to live without a quiet season. Not everyone who lives there is better off for it.
Spain Expat Press Editorial Team
The end of October once marked the moment the Costa del Sol exhaled. Beach bars stacked their chairs, hotels shuttered their upper floors and the coast settled into a long, unhurried winter.
This year the timetable tells a different story. Ryanair has added six new winter routes from Málaga, among them a first direct service to Hamburg, and will offer more than 3.4 million seats to and from the city between late October and the end of March, roughly 92,000 more than last winter. Airlines do not lay on that kind of capacity for a sleepy off-season.
A record year, despite the rails
It was not supposed to go this way. After January’s train crash at Adamuz and a landslide near Álora, the high-speed AVE link between Madrid and Málaga was out of action for months, and the industry braced itself for heavy losses.
Instead, hotel occupancy over Easter reached almost 83 per cent, according to the regional hoteliers’ association, Aehcos, comfortably ahead of the previous year. Foreign visitors did the heavy lifting, accounting for close to 78 per cent of bookings, while Spanish holidaymakers stayed noticeably closer to home.
The lesson for the winter is a plain one. The coast now leans on international visitors more than ever, and they no longer come only in summer.
The winter engine
Much of the answer lies on the fairway. With more than 70 courses, the region has long marketed itself as the “Costa del Golf”, and when northern Europe turns grey, its high season begins.
A study by the University of Málaga identifies British, German and Swedish players as the coast’s core visitors, drawn by the climate, the hours of sunshine and a dense cluster of resorts. Research carried out by the analytics platform Travellyze for the provincial tourist board suggests the market is not only loyal but well-heeled: most German golf travellers spend between €1,000 and €3,000 a trip, and among Nordic and British players the Costa del Sol ranks at or near the top of the Spanish destinations they intend to revisit.
A finale in Mijas
At the end of the month the coast will also have its moment on television. From 26 to 29 November, La Cala Resort in Mijas hosts the Andalucía Costa del Sol Open de España, the season finale of the Ladies European Tour, for the first time.
With a €700,000 prize fund, underwritten by the regional and provincial authorities, the tournament will settle both the Spanish title and the tour’s order of merit. For the region’s promoters, the pictures matter as much as the result: green fairways and blue skies, broadcast into living rooms across a colder continent.
The price of a busy coast
A year-round season has a cost, and it falls largely on those who live here. Property prices in Málaga province have risen by 62 per cent in five years; a typical 90 sq metre flat now costs more than €310,000.
The pressure reaches the coast’s long-stay winter residents too, the retirees who return each year for months at a time and who depend on a rental market increasingly shaped by holiday lets.
Nor has the off-season quite disappeared. The hoteliers themselves argue that the coast can only claim to have beaten seasonality once hotels stop closing their doors in autumn and winter. That day has not yet come.
