Moving to Marbella: what I'd tell a founder family arriving today

People message me about this almost every week. A founder, usually with kids, usually somewhere cold, asking what it is really like to move to Marbella and what they should think about. I have lived here since 2018, so here is what I would tell a friend.

Do not buy anything for the first six months

The single best piece of advice I can give: test-live first. Rent through Airbnb, pick two or three different areas, and stay three to six months. Marbella looks like one place on a map. On the ground it is a string of very different towns with different weather, different traffic and completely different daily lives.

The people I have seen struggle here are almost always the ones who bought within a few weeks of arriving, based on a nice viewing on a sunny day in May. The people who are happy took their time and let the place tell them where they belonged.

The school and the area decide almost everything

Everything else follows from these two choices, and they are one choice, not two. The school sets your morning, your afternoon, your social circle and, honestly, your kids' friendship group for the next ten years. The area sets whether that school run takes twelve minutes or fifty.

Visit the schools while you are test-living. Go on a normal Tuesday, not on an open day. Talk to parents in the car park rather than to admissions. And drive the route to the school at 8:15 in the morning, in term time, before you decide anything.

Traffic is the thing nobody warns you about

The coast road is beautiful and it is also a bottleneck. In high season a fifteen-minute drive becomes forty-five. If you place your home, your kids' school and your office at three corners of the map, you will spend a large part of your life in a car looking at the back of a van.

So work backwards. Find the school. Then find somewhere to live near it. Then find somewhere to work near that. Not the other way around.

Design for a walking life

This is personal but it has made the biggest difference to how much I enjoy living here. I want to walk. To coffee in the morning, to the beach, to dinner, to the gym. Being in a car every single day for every single errand slowly drains the good out of a place with this much sun.

Some of the most beautiful houses here are up in the hills, and they are stunning, and they also mean you drive for everything. That is a genuine trade-off, not a small detail. Know which one you actually want.

Sort out where you work before you arrive

If you are running a company remotely, decide early whether you are a home-office person, a co-working person, or a café person. Then check the fibre in the house, check the noise, and check what happens in August when the town fills up. I have seen people take a beautiful villa and then discover they have nowhere quiet to take a board call.

Put yourself near the thing you already do

Padel, tennis, golf, sailing, running, whatever it is. Move near the club you will actually use. That is where you meet people, and meeting people is the part of relocating that most people underestimate. The logistics are solvable in a few months. The social side takes longer, and proximity does most of the work for you.

The short version

Rent before you buy. Let the school and the area decide together. Keep the commute short. Live somewhere you can walk. Know where you will work. Get close to your sport.

Do that and the rest of it — the NIE, the bank, the car, the paperwork — is just admin. Annoying admin, but admin. The decisions that actually determine whether you are happy here are the ones you make in the first six months, and they are all about geography.