Puerto Banús

The original plans for Puerto Banús were high-rise apartment blocks. The architect talked the developer out of them, and what got built instead was a fake Andalusian village — low, whitewashed, tiled, walkable — wrapped around a yacht harbour. Fifty years on, the illusion is so effective that people still assume it grew out of a fishing port. It did not. It was built from nothing on empty land.

Who built it, and with whose money

José Banús Masdeu was born in Masó, Tarragona in 1906 and left school at fourteen to work for his father, a builder. The firm they founded in Madrid won the contract for the access road to the Valle de los Caídos, and Banús went on to build much of post-war Madrid’s social housing for the Franco government — he was widely known as the regime’s builder. Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe of the Marbella Club suggested the marina project. The Swiss architect Noldi Schreck, who had worked on Beverly Hills, was brought in and it was Schreck who argued against the skyscraper scheme and proposed the Andalusian village instead, working with his young Mexican assistant Marcos Sáinz. Construction took roughly three years.

The opening

There were two inaugurations in 1970: a civic one in May with local authorities, and the party. The party is what people remember. Around 1,700 guests, headed by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco and the Aga Khan IV, who had built Porto Cervo in Sardinia. Roman Polanski came. Hugh Hefner flew into Málaga on the Playboy jet — he had bought land at Los Monteros for a Playboy city that never got permission. Liza Minnelli attended and came back in 1974 to sing in the Nueva Andalucía bullring. A young Julio Iglesias performed Gwendolyne, the song that had represented Spain at Eurovision earlier that year, for a fee of 125,000 pesetas. Three hundred waiters had to be bussed in from Seville because the coast did not have enough.

Reading it now

Banús’s stated aim was a resort not for the wealthy few but for the wealthy many, and that distinction still explains the place: it is aspirational rather than exclusive, which is why five million visitors a year come to look at boats they will not board. Much of what opened in 1970 has been redeveloped, though Sinatra Bar and Salduba — named after the Roman name for Marbella — have been on the front line since the mid-seventies and remain the best places to watch it all go past. There is a statue of Banús himself at the main entrance.

Frequently asked questions