MARBELLA – In the heart of Spain’s Costa del Sol, at the glitzy Marbella marina packed with luxury yachts bearing British flags, a violent crime wave is unfolding right under tourists’ noses.
Last week, masked men dumped a dying man at the dock in Puerto Banus just metres away from holidaymakers visiting the high-end shops and restaurants of this millionaires’ playground, before speeding off in their vessel.
Twenty-four hours earlier, another body was found dumped on a road in the mountains above Marbella, in what police believe may be another drug-related murder.
The area – known as the “Costa del crime” in the 1980s after it became a popular refuge for British criminals – has faced a rise in murders and kidnappings this year, and new tactics used by international gangs.
Tourists like Molly Taylor have witnessed first hand the reality of the drug trade that drives organised crime.
Mrs Taylor, who lives in London but was staying in Puerto Banus last summer, said she watched drug gangs bring their cargo across from Morocco to Spain on jet-skis.
“It was a really heavy fog that made the marina practically invisible. You could see the jet-skis emerging through the fog and then suddenly we heard the sound of the sound of sirens,” she said.
“The owner of the boat we were on said this always happens when the fog descends – the drug runners capitalise on the lack of visibility and zoom across the water [from Morocco].”
A sunny place for shady people, was how British writer W Somerset Maugham described the French Riviera, but the sobriquet could equally apply to the Costa del Sol.
It is no longer seen as a uniquely British criminal haven, but today gangs from a range of countries operate here, and shootings and drug smuggling hardly raise an eyebrow.
Last month, as British tourists strolled towards the beach, Swedish rapper Hamza Karimi, 25, was shot dead in broad daylight outside a café in Puerto Banus, where the rich still like to show off their Lamborghinis, Ferraris or superyachts.
A man from Liverpool is now awaiting trial in Spain for the alleged murder of two Scottish gang members in May in Fuengirola, a Costa del Sol town known for its sweeping sandy beaches. The pair were gunned down in Monaghan’s bar as tourists watched a Champions League football match.
The mayhem that occasionally flares on the streets is usually confined to settling scores between rival gangs and rarely touches tourists or the large British expat community.
Alfredo Bloy Dawson, 54, a British marketing consultant whose mother is Uruguayan and works in Marbella, said that there was a “feeling that this kind of thing goes on now and then but it has little to do with the life of [Britons] living here”.
“Of course, it is not welcome,” he added.
He said that whenever a shooting or a murder happens it reinforces the feeling that the city attracts the “wrong” kind of tourism.
“When this happens, you quickly see on social media the comments that this is the work of the lower-class tourists that we don’t want around here, the chavs with their big cars or their flashy girlfriends,” said Bloy Dawson, who has lived in Spain for years.
However, the violence along this southerly stretch of Spain’s Mediterranean coast does worry tourists, according to a leading Spanish police officer whose job is to prevent gangland murders.
“There are communities from practically all over the world who come to the Costa del Sol for tourism and practically 99.9 per cent come here for the climate,” said the officer, who declined to be named for operational reasons.
“There are 0.01 per cent who are criminals.
“But every time there is a murder, it is true that it does damage [the image] of the Costa del Sol, because someone who is in Liverpool and is thinking of coming on holiday to Marbella might think again.”
The officer stressed that this part of Spain’s southern coastline was a safe place to come on holiday. But he conceded that a worrying development was the use of teenagers to carry out gangland hits.
In December, a 16-year-old Belgian boy shot a Dutch man 19 times in Fuengirola but was later arrested.
In the first six months of 2025, there was a rise in violent crime on the Costa del Sol, according to Spanish interior ministry figures, with murders rising from 12 to 14; 29 attempted homicides compared with 53 during the whole of 2024; and twice as many kidnappings as a year ago.
However, while violent crime rose in the first half of this year, other types of offences fell.
In an effort to combat multinational organised crime, Spain invited other European countries to form a taskforce to work together.
A British police source with knowledge of Spain, who did not want to be named, said Madrid is worried about the effect of crime on tourism and the spread of corruption.
“This was a criminal ecosystem. British criminals went there because there was no extradition treaty [between Spain and Britain] and it was carried on. It is only relatively recently that [the Spanish government and police] have decided to do something about [it]. It is embarrassing and it spills over,” he said.
“It corrupts other people like the police and port workers. It seeps out and corrupts other people.”
Spanish police last Wednesday paraded an arsenal of 37 machine guns, pistols and ammunition seized from 55 gang members who were arrested in the past month on the Costa del Sol.
Cocaine with The Simpsons motif was put on show, with armed police in attendance, as officers announced nine tonnes of the drug and hash worth tens of millions of pounds had been seized.
Alistair Spence Clarke, 73, an accountant who moved from London to Marbella in 1989, said that when he arrived to take up a job the place was crime-ridden, with sex workers on the streets and violent crime at a high.
Today, he says, despite the continued presence of murders and drug dealing, Marbella feels a safe place, possibly because criminals like it that way.
“I am speculating but I suppose that some of the criminals who live here actually like living here because it is a nice place for their families,” he said.
“They might be down here, but they are not going to make a mess on their doorstep. So, the foreigners here don’t necessarily notice too much of the problem.”