Puerto Banús History: The Gala That Launched the Jet Set Puerto Banús history: how José Banús opened a pleasure port in 1970, why Princess Grace and Julio Iglesias were at the gala, and how the jet set years shaped the Marbella we know. A developer decides fishing boats deserve better neighbours By the late 1960s Marbella had the hotel, the beach and the aristocrats, but it lacked the one thing every self-respecting jet set destination needs: somewhere to park a yacht. José Banús, a property developer with grand instincts, set out to build a pleasure port between Marbella and San Pedro. The result, Puerto Banús, opened in 1970 and became the physical centre of the coast's social life for the next half century. The inauguration did things properly. The gala in May 1970 drew a guest list that reads like a time capsule: Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco attended, alongside Hugh Hefner, the Aga Khan, director Roman Polanski and Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who had performed the world's first human heart transplant in December 1967. A young Spanish singer named Julio Iglesias was hired to sing for the room. He did not stay unknown for long. The queen without a throne If the port was the stage, Gunilla von Bismarck became one of its main performers. The great-granddaughter of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck arrived on the Costa del Sol in 1961, aged twelve, when her family settled in the area. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s she hosted the parties everyone else wanted an invitation to, and she became known as the queen without a throne of Marbella. The town hall eventually named a road after her, a rare honour for someone who never held public office anywhere. She had company in the aristocratic-enthusiast department. Jaime de Mora y Aragón, brother of Queen Fabiola of Belgium, spent decades as the coast's most dedicated bon vivant, appearing in films, lending his name to galas and living out his final years in Marbella until his death there in 1995. James Bond checks in Perhaps the most telling resident of the era was Sean Connery. After marrying Micheline Roquebrune he bought a beachfront property called Malibú, and he spent much of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s between golf rounds and quiet evenings in a town where, as he told interviewers, everyone was pleasant and he could still move freely without a paparazzi escort. The idyll ended in controversy: after he sold, the land was rezoned during the GIL municipal era and a 72-unit luxury apartment block named Malibú went up on the site. The resulting Goldfinger investigation, named after the 1964 Bond film, ended with Connery cleared of any wrongdoing, though the case became a permanent footnote in the town's planning history. What the 1970 opening actually started Puerto Banús quickly outgrew its role as a marina and became shorthand for a whole lifestyle, the cars at the quay, the hulls the size of houses, the season that now runs twelve months a year. Not everyone loved the direction, and the contrast between the pine-shaded discretion of the Marbella Club years and the full-volume glamour of the port has been part of the coast's character ever since: two Marbellas sharing one shoreline, and buyers have been choosing between them ever since. The Marbella Club years and the Puerto Banús years also left different architectural fingerprints, and anyone looking at property here learns to read them quickly. The earlier era is all low white walls, mature pines and gardens that hide the house from the road. The port era is Andalusian village pastiche arranged around a quay, with apartments stacked above shops and restaurants so that life spills straight onto the waterfront. Neither is better, and both have loyal buyers, but they ask for very different habits: one rewards people who like silence and distance, the other people who want to walk downstairs to the action. This is the second part of our history series. You can start with Marbella history: the marquis, the prince and the club, and finish with the royals who came after the jet set. For anyone mapping the coast today, the Marbella New Homes team knows which neighbourhood belongs to which era, and what that means for prices, privacy and resale.