Marbella is both tabula rasa and palimpsest. It can be anything to anyone. You can meet a rock star in the morning and a member of European royalty in the afternoon. There can’t be many places where two such unique personalities might intersect. To paraphrase Churchill, it is a kaleidoscope, wrapped in a mosaic, inside a melting pot. The result of successive waves of visitors who have left their marks over the years, Marbella is a social archaeological site where generations have lived lives of sun-gilded leisure. Today the popular image of Marbella may be of a sort of European Miami, but one need only scratch this glitzy surface to be taken back to the time when Marbella was a simpler place.

During the 1950s it was a quiet, dusty, traditional village, and today the old town is still a charming warren of streets, some so narrow that you can touch the rough white walls on either side. At Easter the solemn and dramatic religious processions snake through this maze of alleys and squares, as they have for generations. Yet what is really striking about Marbella is how much has remained the unchanged. Historical figures long connected with the coast, including, of course, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, may have passed into history, but their presence lives on in those who come after them.

With a personal narrative text by historian and journalist Nicholas Foulkes, a longtime Marbella visitor, this colorful volume illustrates varied aspects of this picturesque port, from the mountains to the beaches, from the delightful old town to the glamorous nightlife.

• Hardcover
• 304 Pages

Author, historian and journalist Nicholas Foulkes is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Financial Times How to Spend It, GQ and The Rake magazine. Best known for his trilogy of nineteenth-century British histories, Last of the Dandies, Dancing into Battle, and Gentlemen and Blackguards, he has published around thirty books on history, the arts and style. Among his recent works are a biography of the painter Bernard Buffet (Random House), a biography of Princess Ira von Fürstenberg (Harper Collins) and Time Tamed, a history of humankind’s calibration of time from the Paleolithic era to the Moon landings (Simon & Schuster). His books for Assouline include Bals: Legendary Costume Balls of the Twentieth Century (2011), Swans: Legends of the Jet Society (2013), The Impossible Collection of Watches (2014) and Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso (2020).

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