Why go
The village and Arroyo de la Miel hold different parts of this story. The inland town was damaged during the Christian conquest and proved hard to resettle. Paper factories later helped establish Arroyo de la Miel, whose Plaza de España still gives that industrial chapter a place to look for.
The full story
Christian armies destroyed Benalmádena's fort and town in the fifteenth century, first in 1456 and again during the 1485 conquest. Residents took refuge in Mijas. A resettlement effort ordered in 1491 struggled with an earthquake and attacks from the sea. These episodes help explain why the old village's continuity was far from assured. A different centre emerged in the eighteenth century. In 1784 Félix Solesio acquired land at Arroyo de la Miel for paper factories supplying the Royal Playing Card Factory in Macharaviaya. The enterprise helped form a settlement around the factories near today's Plaza de España. The Portal de San Carlos and La Tribuna building are named traces of that period. In the nineteenth century, muscatel grapes supported wine production, but phylloxera damaged vineyards across the province. Mass tourism brought another major shift from the 1950s onward, expanding the municipality toward the coast.