Royals in Marbella: From King Fahd to Princess Diana Royals in Marbella: King Fahd's Golden Mile palace and Princess Diana's 1994 Costa del Sol getaway, and what decades of royal guests mean for the property market. A palace modelled on the White House, and a summer court to match By the 1980s Marbella's appeal had crossed from European aristocracy into actual royal households, and nobody raised the stakes like King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. On the Golden Mile, within sight of the sea, he built a palace modelled on the White House, by most accounts larger than the original. When the king came for his summer stays the operation resembled a moving capital: staff measured in the thousands by some counts, security cordons everywhere, and an entire seasonal economy that local businesses learned to count on. Fahd died in 2005, and the palace still stands behind its walls today, one of the most quietly famous private residences in Spain. The princess who wanted a quiet weekend The most famous royal visit of the 1990s was meant to be nothing of the kind. In 1994 Princess Diana came to the Costa del Sol for a private break with two friends, no announcements, no official programme, no protection officers. As press accounts later described it, the group arrived unescorted, judged their first accommodation unsuitable, and ended up at the Byblos hotel in Mijas, one of the grandest addresses of that era, after a British hairdresser from the tennis complex drove them there in his Ford Escort. What followed became a lesson in how much the world had changed since the Marbella Club years. Photographers camped around the hotel for days, and pictures of Diana sunbathing by the pool were sold for a reported million pounds, then locked away by the magazine that bought them. The coast had been hosting famous faces for four decades, but the Diana weekend is still the story locals tell when they explain what the arrival of the modern celebrity economy felt like. She is also reported to have returned to Marbella with the young princes William and Harry, staying at the villa of her close friend Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a reminder that by the 90s the coast's stock of private villas had itself become royal infrastructure, places where a household known by first name alone could simply be a family on holiday. Why the royal thread never went away The pattern Fahd and Diana confirmed has repeated ever since, with Gulf royal families, European royals and whoever the decade's icons happen to be. People who could live anywhere keep choosing this stretch of coast for the same three reasons Soriano's guests discovered in the 1940s: the light, the discretion and the short distance between the mountains and the sea. The Golden Mile, the hills above it and the quieter enclaves either side of town now hold some of the most expensive residential land in Spain, and the privacy that once came free with obscurity has become the asset itself, guarded by walls, mature gardens and a local culture of not asking. There is a quieter detail in all of this that long-term residents tend to mention first. The royal and celebrity visitors rarely changed the way ordinary Marbella worked. The bakeries, the fishmongers, the school runs and the Sunday lunches carried on around them, and the town learned to treat famous faces as part of the scenery. That habit of not making a fuss is a large part of why the coast keeps its appeal for people who value being left alone, and it is the reason a Golden Mile address still comes with a certain unspoken etiquette about privacy. This is the final part of our series on the people who made the coast. Start with Marbella history: the marquis, the prince and the club, then read the Puerto Banús story. The practical takeaway for buyers is simple: pedigree still prices in here. The Marbella New Homes team works the micro-markets where this history happened, and knows which addresses carry it honestly.