Marbella

Before Marbella meant superyachts and celebrities, it was Spain’s iron capital, producing 75% of the country’s cast iron from the first non-military blast furnaces in 1832. When that industry collapsed in 1860, the town shrank back to a fishing village of 900 souls. Then in 1946, Prince Maximilian von Hohenlohe drove south from Madrid in his Rolls-Royce, stopped for a picnic on the coast, and liked what he saw. He sent his son, Alfonso, back the following year to buy the land. Alfonso invited his Rothschild and Thyssen friends, and accidentally invented the Costa del Sol’s first luxury hotel from what was meant to be his private residence: he simply had too many famous houseguests.

Alfonso didn’t set out to build a hotel. Santa Margarita, the estate he bought in 1947, was meant to be a family retreat, and when he opened it to guests in 1954 he called it the Marbella Club Motel, dropping the word “motel” once the sort of people who summered in St. Moritz and Monaco started showing up. Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Cary Grant all passed through soon after, drawn less by advertising than by word of mouth among a very specific circle. The relative who first scouted the coast, Ricardo Soriano, Marquis of Ivanrey, never got a hotel named after him. He just got a good picnic spot.