St. Regis Marbella: What Was Announced, Where Las Dunas Is, and What It Means for Marbella East

This plot has been “about to happen” for as long as I have worked on this coast. It was presented as a W hotel in 2016, promised for 2021, and then went quiet for years while the planning worked its way through the Junta. So I want to be careful here: today’s news is a brand and a set of numbers, not a crane on the beach. But it is the most concrete the project has ever been, and the brand is a bigger one than anyone expected a decade ago.

Below is everything that is public, where it comes from, what is still missing, and what it does to the east side of Marbella, which is where we spend a lot of our time.

St. Regis Marbella: what was announced on 20 October 2026

The project is called St. Regis Hotels & Resorts Las Dunas. It is two things under one brand: The St. Regis Marbella Resort, a hotel, and The Residences at The St. Regis Marbella Resort, the homes. Expansión broke the story on the morning of 20 October and the developers presented the agreement the same day.

Three people spoke on the record. Carlos Rodríguez, CEO of Sierra Blanca Estates, said that beachfront land on this coast “ran out decades ago” and that assembling a plot of this size and quality “is an opportunity that will not come around again.” Harry Mohinani, founder of Platinum Estates, said Las Dunas “has been part of our vision for Marbella from day one” and that it took years to get the land, the licences and a local partner in place. Jerome Briet, Marriott’s Chief Development Officer for EMEA, called it “an extraordinary opportunity to expand our luxury portfolio into a truly exceptional seafront setting.” Those are my translations from the Spanish press.

The agreement itself was signed in Marbella on Tuesday 20 October, in front of the mayor, by Carlos Rodríguez for Sierra Blanca Estates, Roshni Mohinani for Platinum Estates and Marc Messerti, Marriott International’s development director for Spain and Portugal. Rodríguez presented the project in more detail than the morning press release, and the figures below come from that presentation as reported by Málaga Hoy. One number moved: he spoke of 165 hotel rooms, while the developers’ own release, Expansión and Hosteltur say 169. I keep 169 in the table because it is the written figure, and I will correct it if the licence says otherwise.

What is inside the hotel and the residences

Messerti explained why Marriott chose Marbella for the brand’s first hotel on the mainland. His argument was seasonality: the Costa Smeralda, the Côte d’Azur and the Greek islands all close for part of the year, Marbella does not, and St. Regis wants a resort that works twelve months. He added the airport, which handles about 27 million passengers and has 1,500 million euros of expansion planned to take it to 37 million, and the golf, 70 courses along 170 km of coast with about twenty of them in Marbella. Hosteltur also recalls that when the Junta approved the planning change in 2024, Ritz-Carlton was the other Marriott brand in the running. St. Regis won.

One correction to a line you will read elsewhere: this is not the first St. Regis in Spain. Mallorca has had one for years, and St. Regis branded residences are already selling at Finca Cortesín in Casares. It is the first St. Regis hotel on the Costa del Sol, which is the claim Expansión actually makes.

Where the St. Regis Marbella will be: Las Dunas, Real de Zaragoza

The plot sits on the beach at Real de Zaragoza, in Las Chapas, between the Golden Beach urbanisation and the stretch of sand the Casanis beach club made famous for its sunset parties. It is about 10 km east of Marbella centre, with the A-7 behind it and around 200 metres of beach frontage. Elviria is the next neighbourhood east, with its supermarkets, the Hotel Don Carlos and the international schools that make this side of town work for families.

If you have driven that road you know the site: a long, flat, undeveloped strip of dune and scrub with the sea behind it. It is one of the last large empty beachfront plots in Marbella, which is the whole reason this project has survived ten years of delays. Nobody walks away from 160,000 m² on the sand.

The dune system there is also one of the more intact bits of coastal habitat left on this part of the coast, which is why the infrastructure licence comes with dune regeneration, tree conservation and a sustainable channelling of the Arroyo Real de Zaragoza attached. More on that below.

From W Marbella to St. Regis: ten years of the Las Dunas plot

I keep this timeline because almost every article on Las Dunas quotes a different number of rooms, residences and millions. They are not wrong, they are just from different years.

Two things stand out in that table. The residence count went down from 180 to 151 while the unit sizes went up to 1,000 m², so the mix moved upmarket. And the opening date has slipped from 2019 to 2021 to 2028 to 2031 over the life of the project, which is the normal pattern for anything built on virgin beachfront in Marbella. The Four Seasons at Los Monteros has a similar history.

Is the St. Regis Marbella approved? Where the planning stands

This is the part the press releases skip, and it matters if you are thinking about buying off plan here.

• The planning framework is approved. The Junta signed off the modification of elements of Marbella’s 1986 PGOU for the sector in November 2024. That is the document that says a hotel and residences can go here at all.
• The urbanisation licence is approved. On 12 May 2026 Marbella’s Junta de Gobierno Local granted the licence for the infrastructure phase: over a kilometre of storm drains, a new bridge to Golden Beach, cycle lanes, pedestrian areas, new electricity, water and telecoms networks, dune regeneration, flood prevention and the channelling of the Arroyo Real de Zaragoza. The developers put this phase at €23.5 million.
• The building licences for the hotel and the residences are not yet public. As far as I can find, they have not been granted. Those come after the urbanisation works and are the ones that let construction start on the buildings themselves.

One more piece of context: all of this was approved under Marbella’s 1986 general plan with a sector-specific modification, because the 2010 plan was annulled in 2015. Marbella’s new PGOM is meant to stop future projects needing a decade of case-by-case fixes, but Las Dunas got through under the old rules.

At the signing on 20 October the mayor said the urbanisation project is now being presented to the town hall and that the council wants to speed up the licence and the start of works. Rodríguez said the works would begin before the end of the year and that this phase would take 18 months. That matches the sequence above: the urbanisation licence from May covers the infrastructure, and the building licences come next.

So “works start this year” means roads, drains and the bridge, not foundations for the hotel. Early 2031 for the hotel gives about four years for the building phase after that, which is realistic for a resort of this size if nothing gets appealed. On this coast, something usually gets appealed. I would treat 2031 as the target, not a promise.

What Marbella gets: dunes, the stream, the coastal path and a service road

The developers are calling this “a project for the city” as much as a resort, and on the numbers they gave on 20 October that is not only marketing. Of the 16 hectares in the sector, 69% stays in public use and ownership, which is more than eleven hectares of green space, restored dunes, public facilities, roads and public parking. The resort sits on the rest.

• The dunes come first. Before anything else is built, 3.2 hectares of dune inside the sector and about 1.6 hectares outside it are to be restored, and close to 13,000 m² of invasive plant species cleared.
• The Arroyo Real de Zaragoza, the stream that reaches the sea at the eastern edge of the plot, is channelled to cut the flood risk. A storm tank collects rainwater, and all irrigation is to use reclaimed water.
• The Senda Litoral, Marbella’s coastal path, gains 516 metres through the site and a 40 metre wooden footbridge over the mouth of the stream to Golden Beach. There will be 277 public parking spaces.
• A service road parallel to the A-7, combining two new stretches with two existing ones, is meant to take local traffic off the motorway junctions. The route was drawn to touch as few homes and plots as possible.
• Jobs: over 2,000 direct and 4,500 indirect during construction, and more than 450 permanent posts once the hotel opens.

For anyone who already owns in Golden Beach, Las Chapas or Elviria, the footbridge and the extra stretch of coastal path are the pieces that change daily life. The service road is the one to read carefully once the plans are on public display, because a new road behind the A-7 is good for traffic and not always good for the homes nearest to it.

St. Regis Marbella residences: sizes, prices and what is not known

What is known: 151 homes, two to five bedrooms, 150 m² to 1,000 m² with an average of about 170 m² inside, sea facing, with terraces, gardens and shared roof terraces, their own entrance and lobby away from the hotel reception, and full use of the hotel’s restaurants, wellness, sport, pools and beach club all year. The developers have said from the start that the hotel will be able to operate the private residences, which means an optional rental programme where the hotel lets your home when you are not there and shares the income.

What is not known: prices, floor plans, the service charge, the rental split, the delivery date for the homes, or whether sales have formally opened. Sierra Blanca and Platinum are taking registrations of interest. Anyone quoting a price per square metre for Las Dunas right now is guessing, and I would rather tell you that than guess with them.

What you should expect, because it is how every branded residence on this coast works: a community fee set by the operator and higher than a normal urbanisation, a contract that governs what you can change inside your home, and a reserve fund for refurbishing the common areas after roughly ten years so the building still looks like a St. Regis. The service contract matters more than the floor plan. Read it before the deposit, not after.

If you want a sense of the price bracket, the nearest comparison is the St. Regis Residences at Finca Cortesín, which are selling now and which we list. They are inland on a golf resort rather than on the beach, so Las Dunas will sit above them, not level with them.

What the St. Regis does to Marbella East property

Marbella East runs from Río Real to Cabopino: Río Real, Los Monteros, El Rosario, Las Chapas, Elviria and Cabopino. It has always had more beach, lower density and lower prices per square metre than the Golden Mile, and for a long time no five-star hotel at all after the old Incosol closed and Los Monteros faded.

That is changing in a cluster. Four Seasons is coming to Los Monteros. Oakmond is replacing Incosol with a €260 million longevity resort. Now St. Regis takes the beach at Las Chapas. Three international flags inside five kilometres of coast that had none.

What that does to prices is slower than the headlines suggest. A hotel brand does not lift the value of an apartment in Elviria the day it is announced. What it does is bring a type of buyer who was not looking east before, and the people who sell to that buyer, and over five or six years that shows up in the asking prices of the better villas and front line apartments nearby. We saw the same pattern in Benahavís around the Villa Padierna years. If you own in Las Chapas or Elviria, you are not suddenly richer today. You are holding in an area whose ceiling just moved.

The other real effect is infrastructure. The €23.5 million urbanisation phase pays for drainage, a new bridge and the road works around Golden Beach, and the Arroyo Real de Zaragoza gets channelled properly. That part of the coast floods in a bad autumn. The neighbours get that fixed whether or not they ever set foot in the hotel. Add the sound barrier works on the A-7 and the east side is getting more public money spent on it than it has in a long time.

What is around Las Dunas: beach clubs, schools, golf, hospital

I ran the plot’s coordinates through Google Places and the road network to see what a future owner actually lives next to. The short version: this is already a serviced neighbourhood, not a field. Distances to the plot below are in a straight line unless marked as road.

The point of that table is not that Las Dunas has amenities. It is that Las Chapas and Elviria already had them, which is why families have lived on this side of Marbella for forty years without a five-star hotel. The hotel arrives into a working neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood is what makes the residences liveable rather than a resort you only visit in August.

What Santina has for sale near Las Dunas today

You do not have to wait until 2031 to buy on this stretch. These are the new developments we list within six kilometres of the plot, ranked by distance, with today’s starting prices from our listings.

Two of those sit on the same beach. Dunique at Las Chapas is the closest thing to what Las Dunas will offer, beachfront and new, and it exists now. Villas Sirocco is 900 metres from the plot. For resale apartments and villas across the east side, our Marbella properties page is filtered live from the CRM, and the Las Chapas and Elviria guides explain the streets. Prices above are starting prices on the day of writing and move as units sell.

What I would do with this news

If you are a buyer who wants Las Dunas itself, register interest with the developers through us and then wait for the price list and the service contract. There is nothing to decide until those exist.

If you are a buyer who likes the east side but does not need the St. Regis flag, this is the window. Front line and second line in Las Chapas, Elviria and Los Monteros are still priced as the quiet side of Marbella. You can see what is on the market on our Marbella properties page and the current new developments in Marbella, or use Find My Area if you are not sure which neighbourhood suits you.

If you own in the area, do nothing today. Keep the property, keep an eye on when the building licence is granted, and talk to us when it is. That is the moment the market starts pricing the hotel in.

Branded residences on the Costa del Sol: what you can buy today

Las Dunas is the fourth or fifth time in a few years that a global brand has put its name on homes between Sotogrande and Marbella. Armani Residences and Design Hills by Dolce & Gabbana on the Golden Mile, Karl Lagerfeld villas above Marbella, the Lanserhof and St. Regis Residences at Finca Cortesín. All of them come from the same place: buyers who want hotel-grade service in a home they own, and are willing to pay for the operator’s name.

Of that list, the St. Regis Residences at Finca Cortesín are the ones you can actually buy today, with prices, plans and a delivery date. We have them on the St. Regis Residences listing, and you can see the wider off-plan options we work with. If what attracted you to today’s news is the brand and the service model rather than the specific beach, that is where I would look first. If it is the beach, wait for Las Dunas. We will update this post when the building licence and the price list appear.

Sources: Expansión (20 October 2026), Vida.es (20 October 2026), El Confidencial (17 June 2025), idealista/news (9 July 2025), Hosteltur (25 November 2024 and 21 October 2026), Málaga Hoy (20 October 2026, report of the signing and presentation), and the Marbella town hall’s public information portal for the 12 May 2026 urbanisation licence. Quotes translated from Spanish by the author.

Questions people are asking