Marbella prepares for a decisive urban planning shift

The news out of Marbella is exciting and filled with promise. It has been a long slog to get here but finally the new planning law, known as the PGOM, is set to be ratified by the town council in June, 2025.

Already the council has received positive feedback through an extensive and transparent community consultation process. This resulted in 65 final reports on the new law, all of them positive. There remains only an environmental report that will not delay the process and final approval from the Junta de Andalucía. It is expected to be law before the end of 2025.

Having a planning law for the future means replacing a planning law rooted in a very different past. Prior to this moment, Marbella was governed by a planning law established in 1986, which was woefully out of date.

This will mark the end of a saga that began in many ways in 1998. Then, the town’s notoriously corrupt regime, under the mayorship of Jesús Gil, passed a planning law literally in the middle of the night. It was intended to cover up the corruption that had led to 18,000 illegally built homes in the city. Many, if not most, of those homes were built with the best of intentions but were not properly zoned and therefore not legal.

Gil ultimately was barred from office and the entire council was disbanded in 2006 because of corruption. In 2010 there was an attempt to replace Gil’s unacceptable law but that too was struck down in 2015, causing Marbella to revert to the 1986 planning law.

Passing this new law, and the new regional planning law known as the LISTA, are a guarantee that Marbella will be able to unblock an antiquated, slow-moving bureaucratic process. The previous situation had not only slowed economic growth and development, it had also prevented improvements in infrastructure, green spaces and more.

This new plan will mean that there are 13 million square metres more urban land available for development. As you can imagine, this will have a huge impact. There is a hunger to build that had been prevented by the lack of available land in the past.

There is also an increase in rural land available for development. This will permit the construction of public infrastructure projects, such as university campuses with student residences, sports complexes, rural hotels, and more.

And, finally, all of those illegally built homes will be regularized and made legal. The owners had lived with legal limbo for years and can now sleep securely. It will almost certainly mean that those homes find their true value, which had been suppressed by their legal situation.

This new planning regime will unlock green spaces, infrastructure improvements and economic diversification. Just some of the long term plans on the table now are very impressive.

“A whopping 3,676 private homes and 2,062 public housing units are in the pipeline, along with over 60,000 square metres of commercial space and an eye-watering 104,604 square metres dedicated to hotels. It’s safe to say that Marbella’s skyline is set for a radical facelift.”

Combined with Marbella’s already booming development this will only add momentum to a city on the verge of greatness. Marbella has unlocked a door to the future and looks set to become a major destination and economic hub for the development of the Costa del Sol and Málaga province as a whole.

By Adam Neale | Property News | June 25th, 2025

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