Revealed: list of the 100 most expensive places to buy and rent in Spain (and some of them may surprise you)

A billionaire’s playground on the Costa del Sol where Putin has a house tops the ranking, but five coastal towns in Murcia and Alicante also make the list

A recent ranking of the 100 most expensive towns and cities to buy and rent a home in Spain has shown that the highest average prices in the country are in tourist locations along the Mediterranean coast and in the Balearic Islands such as Mallorca and Ibiza.

The study found that the municipality of Benahavís in Malaga province on the Costa del Sol was the most expensive place to buy and rent property in Spain.

In second place was Calvià in Mallorca and in third place was Marbella, also in Malaga. In all three of these localities, the average house price is over one million euros, and rental prices are in excess of 2,800 euros/month.

The Alicante towns of Javea and Altea both feature in the top ten, with average house prices of over half a million euros. Elsewhere in Alicante, Guardamar del Segura moved up several positions in the ranking to reach 67th place, with an average sale price of 178,500 euros.

Benahavís, the billionaire’s playground in Spain

The reason that the Malaga town of Benahavís is in the lead is that it has some of the most exclusive urbanisations and gated communities in Spain, such as the famed La Zagaleta, where multimillionaires as diverse as Simon Cowell, Lord Alan Sugar and Vladimir Putin.

Here, buying a home will set you back an average of 1.8 million euros, whereas property prices in neighbouring Marbella are a much more affordable 1.1 million.