Britons buy property in Spain seeking the sun and it doesn’t get much sunnier than the Costa del Sol (that’s what the name means after all). This western edge of the Mediterranean also enjoys beautifully warm waters. These cool a little as you head west to the Costa de la Luz (Coast of Light) where the waters drive in from the Atlantic. The official figures tell us that the Costa del Sol enjoys 320 days of sunshine a year, and is even pleasantly mild in winter, with a January average of 16°C.

So popular is it that there are more Brits here than in the rest of Spain combined. Guess-timates have it that there are some half a million Britons living here, as well as around 200,000 German. In total there are some three million homes on the Costa del Sol owned by foreigners. That’s before you get to the tourists. Around nine million people come to the Costa del Sol on holiday each year.

The Costa del Sol isn’t an administrative area as such. Spain is split into 17 autonomous communities (think counties in the UK or states in the US), and each community is further subdivided into provinces. Our area is the autonomous community (or region) of Andalucia and largely co-exists with the province of Malaga. The city of Malaga is the de facto capital of the Costa del Sol and has a population of 500,000, making it the fifth largest city in Spain. Communications are good, with most visitors flying in to Malaga airport (there is also the offshore Gibraltar airport).

And there’s lots to do for those buying property on the Costa del Sol. It isn’t stretching a point to far to say you could be skiing in the Sierra Nevada (the snowy mountains) in the morning and soaking up the sun on the coast in the afternoon (the drive from coast to slopes is two hours). Watersports are hugely popular, and there are numerous golf courses catering to visitors. While large parts of the coast get unbearably busy during the height of the summer, you are never too far from unspoiled countryside, but you will learn to time when NOT to drive. Certain towns on the coast have large British, German and Scandinavian populations - many people have settled here down the years. If you wanted to, you could probably live on the Costa del Sol and speak very little Spanish, though that would be a shame.

The nature of unspoiled natural areas that draw big tourist numbers is that they don’t stay unspoiled for long. Certainly the Costa del Sol has had its share of unsympathetic over-development. The inevitable happened during the Credit Crunch of 2008-09 when the sheer scale of over supply of new property became apparent. In an annus horribilis for the Spanish property market, this coincided with a long overdue clampdown on illegal building practices. Sadly, this has left many unlucky British buyers (some of whom didn’t do their homework and some of whom were simply lied to) out of pocket and with their homes threatened with demolition. Whether all the ‘toxic’ properties have yet been flushed through the system is very questionable. You can protect yourself of course, but it makes it all the more important to seek proper legal advice.

It’s a nonsense to talk about ‘the price of Spanish property’ just as it is ‘the Spanish property market’ as - like in any property market - there are dozens of micro markets. Every region is different and some are more different than others. Much of Spain still resides in a rural time warp courtesy of a belated catchup from decades of rule by Franco (a blessing in some areas an economic curse in others). But the Costa del Sol is different. Property has for long cost more here, as you would expect with the huge flood of pounds sterling and euros from other parts of Europe (from the Germans and the Scandinavians particularly). Even with a frenetic pace of development and building, which as we saw from 2007 onwards started to unravel badly, supply still wasn’t enough to choke off prices.

That’s all changing now, of which more elsewhere, but even with the collapse of the Spanish property market, some areas will always be strong. The prime location has always been Marbella, with its superb marina at Puerto Banus. Marbella has managed to remain both popular and expensive and has grown accordingly. Close to Marbella is ‘Golf Valley’ with its superb courses and the new town of Nueva Andalucia and along the coast we have the bustling town of Fuengirola and Mijas Costa. Other near neighbours to Marbella are Benalmadena and Torremolinos, which had a truly dreadful reputation as a mass tourist destination in the 1970s (check out ‘Carry On Abroad’ for a contemporaneous view!) but has come back in some style, having many permanent British residents.