A machine for leisure

A guest who wanted to telephone Madrid from the Marbella Club in 1954 could expect to wait between four and six hours for the line. Málaga was quicker, one to two. The hotel had one of the very few telephones in Marbella, so neighbours came in to use it, and while the call queued they swam, or played tennis, or had lunch, or sat down to a rubber of bridge. The hotel itself was small: twenty bedrooms, a dining room and a bar, all inside an old farmhouse among figs and pines. A double room with full board cost 285 pesetas a night, something under two euros. None of which, on the face of it, explains why anyone with somewhere better to be would stay.

What the delay produced is the thing to hold on to. A person who has to wait six hours for Madrid will, if the surroundings are right, decide that the waiting is the better part of the day. The first thing the Marbella Club ever made was not luxury. It was time. Everything the place became was already folded into that first slow afternoon by the telephone, though no one in 1954 would have called it a product.

Prince Alfonso de Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who built the place, understood this earlier than most. He was born in Madrid in 1924, the eldest son of a German-Spanish family with a Rolls-Royce and the habit of driving it along coastlines. The family found Marbella in 1946 in the usual aristocratic manner, which is to say more or less by accident, somewhere between one place they meant to be and another. Alfonso came back the following year and bought the finca. Santa Margarita, it was called: figs, pines, a fishing village down the hill, a road to Algeciras that was a cart track in places. He built a house. Friends came to stay. The friends did not want to leave, and in 1954 he stopped pretending they were anything other than guests and opened the doors as a hotel.

What he opened was not, in any received sense, a grand hotel. The continental model in 1954 meant Deauville and the Riviera: gilt, formality, a uniformed distance between the staff and the rich. The Marbella Club was the opposite of all that, and the opposition was deliberate. Count Rudi, Alfonso's cousin, who came to manage the place in 1957 and stayed for decades, described the founding register in two words. Elegant simplicity. A private house that happened to have guests, run by a man who treated the running of it as a form of hospitality rather than a trade.

This is the part worth slowing down on, because it is where the machinery actually lives. Alfonso was not selling rooms. He was selling a way of spending an afternoon, and a way of spending an afternoon is a far more durable product than a room, because it can be sold again the next day to the same person without their noticing they have bought anything.

Consider, then, what the place actually gathered: the Tuesday gala dinners at the Beach Club where dress was elegant but ties were not; the clientele that assembled without being summoned, word of the club running along the routes between Morocco and Portugal and France; the travellers who stopped by chance for a bed and found the rest by accident; and then the ones who did not arrive by accident at all, the Bismarcks, the Metternichs, the Rothschilds, the Agnellis, the Krupps, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn who came with Mel Ferrer, James Stewart, and the Duke of Windsor, who turned up to a Tuesday dinner in a Hawaiian shirt, went to change, thought better of the whole question, and resolved it by throwing the shirt into the pool.

The detail is comic and it is also the entire design specification. The Marbella Club worked because it set a standard high enough to mean something and loose enough that a former king could break it into a swimming pool and the evening would be improved rather than damaged. That balance does not happen on its own. It is engineered, in the way that a garden is engineered, by someone who has thought very hard about the relationship between what is allowed and what is expected.

By 1967 the trickle had become what one account calls an avalanche of aristocrats, dignitaries and celebrities. The fishing village, which had held perhaps twelve thousand people when Alfonso arrived, was now an address. And here the machine reveals its second and larger output. Alfonso had been selling neighbouring plots almost from the start, to his friends, the Rothschilds and the Thyssens among them. The hotel had taught the coast a lesson about itself, and the lesson was that people with money would pay to be near this particular quality of afternoon. Everything that followed followed from that. The villas, the second hotels, the marina, the building boom that turned a cart track into the Golden Mile.

The marina is the clearest case, because it is where Alfonso's instinct shows its limits and its character at once. Puerto Banús was built in 1970 by the developer José Banús, a friend, and Alfonso had pointed him at the stretch of coast to the west. When Banús came back with a plan for high-rise towers, Alfonso was appalled. The threat he made is on the record, and it is the threat of a man who knew exactly what he had made and what could unmake it. If this project goes ahead, he said, I will sell my hotel and leave Marbella with all my family and friends. The towers were dropped. The Swiss architect Noldi Schreck redrew the marina as a low Andalusian village, white and horizontal, and that is the Puerto Banús that exists.

Read that exchange closely. Alfonso did not object to development. He had spent fifteen years causing it. He objected to a development that would have broken the product, and the product was never the buildings. It was the feeling that the buildings were there to serve. A high-rise announces itself. The Marbella Club had been built on the principle that the best things are present without insisting on it, and a tower insists. He understood, before the word existed in this sense, that he was in the business of atmosphere, and that atmosphere is the most fragile commodity there is and the most valuable, because it is the one thing the competition along the coast could not simply build more cheaply.

So when the padel courts arrived in 1974, they arrived inside a machine that had been running for twenty years and knew precisely what it was for. A word, here, on what this is and is not. This is not where padel began. It began five years earlier and an ocean away, in Enrique Corcuera's garden in Acapulco, where around 1969 he fitted a court to an awkward space at his house. That is the true start of the game's history, and we will tell it properly in a later issue. But it is where our story begins, because The Alborán is named for the sea that runs along this coast, and because Alfonso, who had seen Corcuera's court, had two of his own built at the club. They were the first in Europe. From Marbella the game moved out through Spain and eventually through more than ninety countries, which is the reason there is a publication writing this sentence.

You can measure how completely the small thing won by where it is now played. A few hundred metres along the same Golden Mile stands Puente Romano, the tennis club Manolo Santana built, for decades the coast's temple to the other racquet game and the last place you would have bet on changing its mind. It now gives its courts over each year to the Reserve Cup, a padel competition; this year's went to Team Sierra Blanca Estates, Arturo Coello and Javi Garrido sealing it in the final. The club that for decades meant tennis now hands its grandest court to padel for a week each summer.

But set padel beside the rest of the output and its true scale becomes clear. The same man, in the same garden, working from the same instinct, produced the European jet-set holiday, the Andalusian coastal villa, the redesign of an entire marina, and a model of hospitality that the Costa del Sol has been copying, diluting, and occasionally betraying for seventy years. The courts were a consequence of all of that, not a cause of it. Alfonso did not look at padel and see a sport. He looked at it the way he looked at the telephone in 1954: as one more thing that would keep the right people in the right chairs for a little longer than they had planned. A game that fit into a garden without dominating it, that required four people and rewarded the ones who talked between points. It suited the kind of afternoon he was already in the business of selling. So he added it to the inventory.

He died in 2003, at Marbella, and is buried there. Drive the Golden Mile now and the coast he assembled runs for kilometres past anything one man could hold in his head, much of it built on the lesson he taught and most of it the kind of thing the towers were, the kind he would have left Marbella rather than permit. The two coasts sit on the same ground: the one he made, present in every low white wall that still defers to the sea, and the one that grew over it, insisting. Padel, the fifty-year-old racquet game now played from Stockholm to Buenos Aires, was the line item he added one afternoon because it fit.