La Duquesa draws its share of visitors, but it's a gentler kind of tourism here, one of the western Costa del Sol's genuinely well-kept secrets. A walkable marina town set between Estepona and Sotogrande, it's shaped more by the rhythm of local life than by the crowds. The harbour is its centre, with restaurants opening onto the water and a beachfront promenade that runs for miles in either direction.

The setting does much of the work. The Sierra Bermeja rises behind the town, and vineyards fill the hills, and several of Andalusia's most respected golf courses sit within 15 minutes' drive. Gibraltar airport is thirty minutes west, Málaga an hour east, well-connected without the noise and density of the coast's busier postcodes.

For buyers, La Duquesa offers something the Marbella corridor no longer can: a real town, at human scale, with the infrastructure of a mature resort and prices that still reflect potential rather than peak. New build activity here is measured, a handful of carefully positioned developments rather than wholesale construction.

I've called this end of the coast home for 23 years, and watching it flourish has been a real joy, one we genuinely want to share. This is the quieter, greener, more relaxed stretch of the Costa del Sol. It's family-led, with the feel of a large village rather than a resort strip, so if partying is your thing, this honestly isn't the area for you. But if you're after somewhere that lives at a human pace and rewards the people who put down roots, La Duquesa is hard to beat.