Maria Caridad

Estepona's casco antiguo is one of the few places left on this coast where the streets still belong to the people who live on them. Maria Caridad sits inside it, on a quiet lane a short walk from Plaza de las Flores and two streets back from the sand. Six townhouses, five of them still available, built from scratch but in the language of the traditional Andalucian casamata: whitewashed walls, wooden shutters, black ironwork and hand-laid decorative tile.

Indoors the vocabulary changes. The homes rise across three levels, from a compact two-bedroom layout of around 125 m² to three-bedroom designs of more than 214 m², with en-suite bathrooms, a private patio at ground level and a roof terrace above the old tiled roofs.

Several houses have two terraces, one of them generous enough to live on through the summer. Structure is solid concrete under plastered walls, roofs are traditional tile and the joinery was made locally.

Casa Teresa, dressed in collaboration with a local interior designer, serves as the show home and reads as the honest test of the scheme: Mediterranean tiling and shutters against open-plan, bright, contemporary rooms. Construction is complete, so what you walk through is what you buy. In a historic centre where buildable plots have effectively run out, that is the rarer proposition.