Marbella Club Hotel, Golf Resort & Spa

In 1954 Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe-Langenburg turned his family's farm, the Finca Santa Margarita, on the coast road west of Marbella into a guest house for his friends and called it the Marbella Club. Within a decade the Marbella Club Hotel, Golf Resort & Spa, as it is now called, had made this stretch of Andalusian shore the Golden Mile and the town of Marbella a name that meant something in Europe.

History

The prince's father, Max Egon of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, had bought the land in the 1940s when Marbella was a fishing town of a few thousand people. Alfonso, a car dealer and racing driver by inclination, built a few rooms around the farmhouse and invited his cousins. The guest list that followed read like the European social register of the 1950s and 1960s, with film actors and Gulf royalty added in later decades. Count Rudolf von Schönburg, Count Rudi to the regulars, joined in 1957 and ran the house for decades, giving it the manners of a private club rather than a hotel. In 1979 the prince opened Puente Romano next door, and the boulevard that runs past both hotels was later named after him. The Shamoon family, who became owners in the late twentieth century, have kept the low-rise, village character that the prince insisted on while adding the spa, the golf course and the villas.

Architecture and design

There is no hotel block. Rooms, suites and bungalows sit in two-storey whitewashed buildings scattered through gardens of pines, palms, bougainvillea and jasmine between the boulevard and the sea, linked by paths and small courtyards. The style is Andalusian village, with tiled roofs, wooden shutters and terraces, and it has been imitated along the coast ever since. The oldest rooms are near the original farmhouse, and the grounds slope gently down to the beach club at the water.

Rooms and suites

Accommodation runs from garden rooms to suites with terraces and to villas with their own pools and staff, the largest of which take extended families for weeks at a time. Decoration is Andalusian in materials, with tiles, timber and white linen, rather than resort-modern.

Dining

The Grill is the dinner restaurant, with a terrace in the gardens and music in the evenings, and the Beach Club serves a buffet lunch at the sea that has drawn Marbella residents for generations. Breakfast is taken in the gardens, and the bars keep the club habit of late evenings.

Wellness

The spa, built around Thai-style treatment pavilions, has a hydrotherapy pool, a wellness clinic and a programme of retreats. The beach club has a heated seawater pool beside the beach. Marbella Club Golf Resort, the hotel's 18-hole course designed by Dave Thomas, lies in the hills at Benahavís, a short drive inland, with an equestrian centre beside it. A kids' club with its own garden runs through the year.

Weddings and events

Weddings are held in the gardens and on the beach, with receptions in the Beach Club and the hotel's private rooms, and the villas take wedding parties for the weekend. Corporate groups use the private rooms and the gardens for dinners, and the golf course for tournaments.

Location

The hotel stands on the Bulevar Príncipe Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the Golden Mile, about three kilometres west of Marbella's old town and three east of Puerto Banús. Málaga Airport is about 50 minutes by road; Gibraltar's airport about an hour. María Zambrano station in Málaga connects to Madrid by high-speed train. It is the luxury hotel in Marbella from which the resort's reputation descends.