Why go
The built landscape is part of the Costa del Sol’s story, especially around the western resort belt. Hotels, apartments, commercial areas and roads spread beyond older fishing towns and into nearby slopes. Natural interruptions such as the Guadalhorce mouth, Artola dunes and Maro-Cerro Gordo cliffs make the scale of that change easier to read.
The full story
Tourism brought a rapid building boom to the Costa del Sol, beginning with large western developments in the 1960s and extending along the shore and inland. The older pattern of distinct fishing settlements and nearby villages became a much more connected urban corridor. Tall buildings concentrated in town centres; housing estates and commercial zones followed major roads and climbed some slopes. That explains the abrupt shifts you can see between a historic core, a beach promenade and modern residential blocks. It also explains why the coast can feel nearly continuous from one municipality to the next. The transformation did not cover every piece of landscape. The mouth of the Guadalhorce near Málaga, the Dunas de Artola and the cliffs of Maro-Cerro Gordo preserve different coastal forms. Pairing one of these places with a developed seafront offers a clearer view of how little level land was available and how strongly tourism changed its use.