The winter you are buying
The product is the climate, so here it is without the brochure: AEMET's 30-year normals put a January afternoon at 16.8°C and a December one at 17.5°C, with 180 hours of January sun. It is a mild, bright winter with real rain in it, not an endless summer. Each month has its own page of normals.
What a long stay costs
Two independent published series, never blended. Idealista's asking prices for Marbella ran €23.9 / m² a month in July 2026: that is what landlords ask on the open market today. The housing ministry's SERPAVI database of declared contract rents puts the 2024 median for a flat in Marbella at €800 a month and for a house at €1,050: that is what sitting tenants actually pay on registered habitual-residence contracts, which a seasonal winter let is not. The gap between those two numbers is the market. The full dataset, zone by zone, lives on the rent page.
- Asking price, Marbella, per month (July 2026)
- €23.9 / m²
- Declared median rent, flats, per month (2024)
- €800
- Declared median rent, houses, per month (2024)
- €1,050
The contract is a seasonal one
Spain's tenancy law splits lets in two: your habitual residence, with its strong tenant protections, and everything else. A winter stay is the law's own textbook example of everything else, named in the statute as a seasonal let, whatever the season. In practice that means the terms are what you negotiate, not what the habitual-residence regime guarantees, so the contract text matters more, not less.
- The statute's own words
- '…por temporada, sea ésta de verano o cualquier otra' (Ley 29/1994, art. 3.2)
The 90-in-180 rule
EU and EEA passports can stay the whole winter without paperwork. Everyone else, the British included, falls under the EU's short-stay rule: 90 days in any 180-day period across the whole Schengen area. A full October-to-April winter does not fit inside it; a longer stay needs a national visa, which is Spain's to grant, not ours to advise on.