Marbella

Marbella's legend is a stretch of coast road, and the register treats it as one address with two houses on it rather than as a town. Both stand on the same shore under the same rule: the beaches of Spain are dominio público marítimo-terrestre, inalienable and imprescriptible, with a six-metre transit easement that must stay permanently free to pedestrians and access points no more than two hundred metres apart in an urban stretch.

The ministry has answered the question these pages keep asking, in four words: there are no private beaches in Spain. Neither house here claims otherwise, and that is worth printing. One heads its own beach section as a beach club and sells cabanas on its pier; the other runs three venues on the sand, two of them styling themselves beach clubs. What they describe is service, and service on public sand is what this shelf's vocabulary calls club held.

The line the register draws here is visible on the ground and easy to lose in prose: the gardens are the house's own land and the shore is not. A guest walks from private planting onto public sand without a sign to mark it, which is why the record names the easement rather than describing the walk.

The register files this coast under the summer, and neither record here carries a published closing date. Where none is published the register says so rather than letting the silence read as a claim to be open all year.