It is not so long ago, Marbella Spain’s undisputed capital of the jet-set was – until their rank Mallorca expired. The atmosphere is still fashionable, though not universally associated with good taste. Marbella is a city in Andalusia, Spain, by the Mediterranean Sea, situated in the province of Málaga, beneath the La Concha mountain.
Marbella and nearby Puerto Banús are important tourist resorts on the Costa del Sol. Marbella is especially popular with tourists from Northern Europe (including the UK, Ireland and Germany), Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and the U.S.A. Marbella is a major destination for luxury cruise ships and mega yachts which are also often docked in its harbour. The area around Marbella is particularly popular with those who like golf. Marbella also hosts a WTA tennis tournament on red clay, the Andalucia Tennis Experience.
In the 1940s, Marbella was a small jasmine-lined village with only 900 inhabitants. But this soon changed when Prince Max Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg and his heir Alfonso de Hohenlohe experienced a problem with their Rolls-Royce in the vicinity. This first encounter with Marbella so impressed Alfonso that he decided to buy land commercially, marketing the area as a tourist destination. In 1954, he opened the Marbella Club Hotel; his son had recently returned from California and the hotel was loosely modelled on the motel style with lower pitched terracotta roofs among 23,000 trees.
Given Alfonso’s maternal membership in Spain’s titled aristocracy (his mother, Doña Piedad Iturbe and Scholtz, was the Marquesa de Belvis de las Navas), and his paternal kinship to the royal courts of Europe, the hotel quickly proved a hit with vacationing members of Europe’s ruling elites, and those privileged to socialise with them in casual yet discreet luxury. Don Jaime de Mora y Aragón, a Spanish bon vivant, brother to Fabiola, Queen of Belgium, Adnan Khashoggi and Guenter Rottman, were frequent vacationers.
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