After more than a decade in limbo, Marbella’s La Bajadilla port has a new concession, a new timeline and a headline figure of over 200 million euros. Here is the history, what has actually been approved, what’s still to be confirmed, and what it could mean for owners and buyers near Marbella’s town centre.
Marbella’s La Bajadilla port is finally moving again. On 2 September 2026, the Andalusian regional government confirmed it had awarded a new 40-year concession for the expansion and transformation of the marina, 16 years after the project was first announced.
Last week, Marbella’s Mayor Ángeles Muñoz announced a new 40-year concession for the redevelopment of Marbella´s fishermen’s marina, more than 15 years after the project was first put out to tender. The Mayor shared the news on Instagram following a visit from the regional development and mobility minister, Mario Muñoz-Atanet, acknowledging her long ambition to rejuvenate the project, the years of work to get the plan approved again, and aspirations that the economic and lifestyle benef¡ts the redevelopment will offer Marbella. The new concessionaire is planned to commence on 1 January 2027, with plans to almost triple berth capacity, accommodate vessels of up to 70 metres, and rebuild much of the surrounding site with an investment of over €200 million.
For anyone following Marbella real estate, this is worth understanding. Below is what has been confirmed, what remains open, and why the story has taken so long to reach this point.
Puerto de la Bajadilla is the port that sits in Marbella’s old fishermen’s quarter, between Playa de la Bajadilla and Playa del Cable, at the eastern end of the town centre seafront. It is a short walk west of Hospital Quirónsalud on Avenida Severo Ochoa, and a short walk from Avenida Ricardo Soriano and the old town. Marbella lighthouse lies roughly 800 metres to the west.
It is one of four marinas in the municipality, alongside Puerto Banús, Cabopino to the east, and Puerto Deportivo Virgen del Carmen, and it is easily confused with the two that most visitors know. Puerto Banús, to the west, is the glamour marina built around superyachts and high-end retail. Puerto Deportivo Virgen del Carmen, also known as Marbella Marina, sits just west of La Bajadilla, closer to the centre.
La Bajadilla is currently the working port: a mixed fishing and leisure marina managed by the Agencia Pública de Puertos de Andalucía, with 268 berths for boats between six and 18 metres and three metres of draught at the entrance and in the basin. Its facilities include a boatyard of around 10,800 m², a 70-tonne travel lift, dry stack storage, a fuel station supplying diesel and petrol, restaurants and a public car park. Its total service area covers just over 155,000 m², of which around 88,000 m² is water. It has never had the profile of its neighbours, which is part of why this redevelopment matters. It is the one with genuine room to grow bringing more amenities and options to Marbella both as a town centre and broader metropolitan area.
The current plan is the second serious attempt to transform the La Bajadilla port area. The saga began in 2010, when the Agencia Pública de Puertos de Andalucía (APPA) ran a competition for a major expansion, the first Andalusian port infrastructure to be delivered under a public-private partnership model.
The original concession was awarded in 2011 to a joint venture led by Nasir Bin Abdullah & Sons, the company of Qatari businessman Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani, then owner of Málaga CF, with Marbella town hall as a partner. The concession itself was held by Nas Marbella, a company majority owned by Al Thani, in which the municipal marina company and the town hall also had stakes.
The losing bidder, Consorcio Marina Internacional de Marbella, a group of ten local and Basque firms, challenged the award. It argued that Nasir Bin Abdullah & Sons could not have met the tender’s requirement of €30 million in turnover over the previous three years, having been incorporated in 2010, and that the town hall could not legally form part of a joint venture of that kind because it is not a commercial company. Its first administrative challenge failed, and it appealed again before taking the dispute to the courts.
That challenge proved well-founded. The Al Thani-led concession never broke ground. In late 2016 the Junta moved to terminate the contract for serious breach of essential obligations: works had never started, and part of the concession fee for 2015 and 2016, amounting to over €1.4 million, had gone unpaid.
In 2017, Andalusia’s High Court (TSJA) annulled the original award outright, finding that the winning company had been newly created for the bid and had neither the minimum turnover nor the marina management experience the process demanded. Later rulings went the same way and the termination stood. The project then sat dormant for the best part of a decade.
The Junta revived the project in 2019, and the original runner-up, Marina Internacional de Marbella, re-entered the process. What followed was years of environmental review, coastal authority reports and legal assessment before a fresh tender could be resolved. The consortium had to adapt its proposal to new environmental and planning requirements, going to public consultation in mid-2024 and obtaining unified environmental authorisation (AAU) in April 2025, one of the last steps before the concession could be awarded.
The September 2026 announcement confirmed that this consortium is planned to be awarded a 40-year concession through APPA.
It is worth being precise about what this means. The project is planned to be awarded, although it won’t be official until after it is exhibited to the public and finalised in the coming weeks. It has not yet been built. The concessionaire is planned to take charge of the port on 1 January 2027, after which it must still finalise a full construction project and secure the remaining permits before any physical works begin.
The scope, as described by the Junta and reported by regional and trade press, includes:
Earlier versions of the plan, drawn up before the 2025 environmental review, also included a waterfront hotel of around 20,500 m². It was withdrawn after the regional Environmental Protection Service notified the promoter that the building was incompatible with Spain’s Coastal Law, citing a report from the Directorate General for Coast and Sea. A helipad that featured in the same earlier documents does not appear in the approved scheme. The project that is planned to be awarded is more focused on marina and public infrastructure than some of the early renderings suggested.
The figure attached to the 2026 announcement is an investment of over €200 million. Earlier stages of the same project were costed at closer to €100 million at the time of the April 2025 environmental authorisation, and at €124.6 million, of which €104.7 million in material execution, in a basic project drawn up by BTP Infraestructuras and submitted for environmental review, which still included the now-cancelled hotel. No detailed public breakdown has yet accompanied the €200 million figure, so it should be treated as indicative until an itemised budget is finalised.
On timing, the only date so far is the 1 January 2027 handover. Earlier technical filings estimated construction at around two years and nine months, though for the smaller version of the scheme, and more recent reporting suggests the concessionaire has roughly eleven months to finalise the detailed design after taking charge, followed by about three years of works. Taken together, that points to somewhere between three and four years from handover to completion. No start date for physical works has been announced.
From what we know, aspirations ofr the future marinais that it could host everything from recreational craft to large yachts and cruise vessels, and the approved plan does include a dedicated cruise terminal. The detail worth understanding is the change in scale.
The 2011 scheme envisaged around 1,220 berths and cruise ships of up to 170 metres. The project now awarded provides roughly 750 berths and a maximum vessel length of 70 metres. Conventional small and mid-sized cruise liners are generally considerably longer than that, so the cruise capability here is best understood as small expedition-class vessels and large yachts rather than mainstream cruise calls. The precise operating picture will be settled in the concessionaire’s executive project.
This is not a criticism of the scheme so much as a reflection of what it is: an unmistakably positive step for the port after more than 15 years of delays, at a more modest scale than the version that collapsed in the courts.
For buyers considering property in Marbella, whether in the town centre, on the Golden Mile or further out, the direct impact of this redevelopment is still some years away. However, a larger, better equipped marina with new retail and public space at the eastern end of Marbella’s town centre seafront has the potential to shift how that part of the city is used and perceived, in the way Puerto Banús reshaped its own surrounding area over time, though on a different scale and with a different character. On a broader level, the project should enhance what the town offers to residents, owners and visitors alike.
While nothing is certain, property owners and potential buyers can take encouragement from the fact that a long-stalled, strategically located asset in central Marbella is finally moving through the process that leads to construction.
The milestones worth watching from here are the formal completion of the concession after public exhibition, handover on 1 January 2027, the submission and approval of the concessionaire’s executive construction project, and the award of construction tenders. Each of these will tell us more about the real timeline and final shape of the redevelopment. We’ll continue to track this story as it develops.
If you are considering buying or selling near Marbella’s town centre and would like to understand how projects like this fit into the wider picture, our team is here to help. Contact MPDunne for tailored advice on the Marbella market.
Melinda Rendina Content Writer & Marketing Coordinator
Melinda is an experienced writer specialising in real estate, urban planning, lifestyle, architecture and design. A seasoned Marbella resident, she holds an Undergraduate Degree in Social Science with Honours in Politics, and a Masters degree in Urban Planning.
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