BUYING a new home – to live in, as a holiday bolthole, or an investment – normally means having to stick to a budget, and the breadth of your choice of bricks and mortar is usually dictated by the size of either your bank account or what said bank is willing to lend you.
If you can afford the peak of luxury, Spain has it - plenty of it, in every region
Usually. Not always. Some of you reading this might be in the fortunate position of being able to buy exactly what you want, because cost is no issue.
And if that's the case, you can afford to splash out on true luxury...so why not?
Where can you find it, though?
Spain's National Institute of Statistics (INE) has compiled a list of the top 10 most expensive streets in the country for residential property purchase, and also the number one most pricey for each of the nation's 15 regions on the mainland and the two encompassing the islands.
It could be you already own a home on one of them – maybe you even bought it years or decades ago with the biggest mortgage you could get a bank to lend you, and had no idea just how much it had earned in equity since; if you're looking to sell, you could use the proceeds for several ultra-high end properties in another location, hopping between them as the mood takes you, or keeping them as a nest-egg.
And it turns out that Spain's most expensive area for buying a home is also the most pricey in the whole of Europe.
Here's where to look if nothing but the most élite will do.
Benahavís (Málaga province)
Although the INE data cover individual streets, the number one most expensive in Spain is, actually, an entire urbanisation. It's in Benahavís, on the Costa del Sol, a town which appears twice in the top 10.
La Zagaleta is at the peak of luxury property in Spain – any home on this residential complex will have an average price tag of just under €10 million.
Forget Chelsea, Kensington, Paris' Avenue Montaigne, or Punta Lada in Italy's Porto Rotondo. Europe's most expensive housing estate is La Zagaleta in Benahavís, Málaga province
More precisely, buying a villa here will set you back a mean figure of €9,956,525.
But that's only the average price. Here, you can easily spend up to €34m on a home if you've got it.
Benahavís also comes in at number five for the most costly homes in Spain in 2022 – if you buy one on the A-397 urbanisation, you'll be spending an average of €7,016,897.
Calvià (Mallorca)
Although the most exclusive properties in the Balearic Islands always seem to be in Ibiza, the largest of the region's four inhabited enclaves, Mallorca, is where you'll find four of the 10 most expensive home-buying streets – two of which are in Calvià.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com