La Zagaleta

La Zagaleta is 900 hectares of protected wooded hillside in Benahavís — originally part of an estate linked to French multimillionaire Thierry Roussel, then acquired by Saudi arms-dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who renamed it La Baraka and ran it as his private hunting reserve. In 1991 a consortium led by Spanish banker Enrique Pérez Flores bought the property and rechristened it La Zagaleta. Construction of the first golf course, internal roads and homes began in 1992. The original plan called for 3,000 dwellings; Pérez reduced it to a hard cap of 420 plots, minimum 3,000 m² each. As of December 2024, La Zagaleta S.L. is wholly owned by Modon Holding of Abu Dhabi.

Inside the gates, around 250 villas have been built — leaving roughly sixty plots still available against the 420 cap. Plot sizes typically run 3,000–8,000 m², with combined cases reaching 15,000 m². Tobal Arquitectos (Miguel and Diego Tobal) have built 110 villas alone — almost half of the estate. Notable homes include Villa Cullinan (€32M, named Best Residential Property in Spain and Europe 2019–2020), Komorebi House (€14.8M), Ibiza Breeze (€14.5M), Villa Salucci (€13.9M), Heaven 11 (€12.9M), Villa Cristal (€12.9M) and Villa Lagoon (€8.5M, Best Villa in Europe 2016). Sectors are zoned A through J — the letter "I" is skipped.

There are two private golf courses. The Old Course — designed by Bradford Benz in 1991, redesigned by Marc Westenborg in 2016 — is a par-72 championship layout of about 6,000 yards. The New Course (Los Barrancos), built 2002–2007 and inaugurated in 2005, is a par-70 executive layout that ran north of €21 million to construct. Both are reserved for residents. The estate also runs an equestrian centre with twenty private stables and eleven club horses, three private fishing lakes, two clubhouses (the original 5,000 m² Cortijo de la Caraba — Khashoggi's converted house — and a thatched lakeside second clubhouse), one clay / one hard / one paddle court, and a residents' helipad with flight times of fifteen minutes to Málaga, ten to Ronda, forty to Seville.

Security is institutional. North and South Gates with armed personnel, twenty-four-hour mobile patrols around the nine-million-m² perimeter, an Israeli-built high-tech electric fence, CCTV and motion sensors throughout. About 1,500 daily non-resident vehicles are screened. South entrance is residents-only; North is the main entry. Wildlife inside the perimeter is genuine — free-roaming deer, wild boar, mouflon, mountain goats, pheasants, eagles, Eurasian eagle owls. Villas trade between roughly €4.8M and €34M+; plots average around €4.5M. Twenty-nine new projects are planned 2025–2027 averaging €18.6M; the billionaire-buyer share has risen 35% since 2021. Hugh Grant and Rod Stewart have owned property here; Hans Snook, founder of Orange, is named in print.