Mijas Costa

Mijas Costa is the seaward strip of the municipality of Mijas: about 12 km of coast from El Faro, where the Calaburras lighthouse stands next to Fuengirola, to Calahonda on the Marbella border. Until the late 1950s this was farmland and a fishing hamlet called La Cala del Moral, watched over by stone towers built from the 16th century against raids from North Africa. Tourism and building from the 1960s turned it into a chain of urbanisations — Calahonda, Riviera del Sol, Miraflores, El Faro, El Chaparral — strung along the A-7, with La Cala de Mijas as the only real village centre.

Daily life splits in two. In La Cala people walk: the boulevard has the bakeries, the Irish pubs, the indoor pool and the Wednesday and Saturday market, and the beach promenade runs to the Torreón. Everywhere else is car country. Calahonda and Riviera are hillside urbanisations of apartment blocks and villas from the tourism boom, with life organised around small commercial centres such as El Zoco, where an Indian restaurant, a Spanish mesón and a British bar sit side by side. The boardwalk of the Senda Litoral links La Cala with Calahonda on foot and, piece by piece, is being extended towards Fuengirola.

It is one of the most international parts of the coast. Mijas as a whole has about 95,000 registered residents (2025) and long had more than a third born abroad, with the British the largest group; the coastal core of La Cala and Calahonda counted almost 27,000 people in 2019. English is the working language of many bars, clinics and clubs, and the weekday golf crowd is largely retired, but La Cala is also a Spanish family town: it has two state secondary schools and several primaries, and St Anthony's College, a British school, sits in the hills behind it.

August and January feel like different places. In summer the chiringuitos on La Cala beach are packed at lunchtime (an August Saturday is the busiest day of the year), beach clubs like Max Beach run night shows, and the La Cala feria fills the last full week of July. In winter many apartments in Calahonda stand shuttered, some beach bars close (Royal Beach's Pirata shuts from late November to mid-February), and the six golf courses — open all year — become the main reason people are here.

The honest downsides: most beaches are narrow strips of sand and rock rather than wide golden bays; La Cala and El Bombo have the most services for families. Apartments close to the A-7 hear the motorway, and the coastal path still has gaps between La Cala and El Faro. There is no train — the nearest Cercanías station is in Fuengirola, about 10 minutes away by car — and nightlife means pubs, show bars and beach clubs, not nightclubs. Prices in La Cala village have risen fast; Calahonda and Riviera remain the cheaper way in.