Alicante-Elche airport handled 19,950,394 passengers in 2025, an 8.5% increase on the year before and a record for the airport, with 88% of those travellers arriving from outside Spain. That is the traffic of a major European hub landing on a strip of coast about 60 kilometres long. It is also the single most useful number for understanding why the southern Costa Blanca prices the way it does, and why a new listing 400 metres from the sand at Punta Prima is worth a careful look rather than a glance.
The property is a ninth-floor penthouse in a new gated residence at Punta Prima, on the Orihuela Costa. It measures 87 square metres inside, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and it comes with a private rooftop solarium of 57 square metres carrying a four-person jacuzzi and an open view over the Mediterranean. A one-eighth share is listed at €125,000. The full listing, with the floor plan and the complete photography, sits on the property page.
The ninth floor and what sits on top of it
Interior space on this coast is rarely the point. Most of the year the useful room in a Costa Blanca home is outdoors, which is why the arithmetic of this particular flat is unusual: 87 square metres inside, and 57 more on the roof. The solarium is the reason to buy it. It is reached by lift, it is private rather than shared, and it holds a jacuzzi sized for four along with enough space to eat, read and sleep off a long lunch without anyone having to move furniture.
Inside, the plan is contemporary and open: kitchen and living room running together in soft, neutral finishes, a terrace off the living space, three bedrooms and two bathrooms fitted as designer rooms rather than builders' standard. The home arrives fully furnished and professionally decorated, down to the glassware, which matters more in shared ownership than in sole ownership. Nobody has to arrive with a van, and no committee has to agree on a sofa.
The residence around it is gated and built to the resort standard the region does well: heated swimming pools set in planted gardens, a gym, a sauna, a padel court, a children's playground, a private garage space and lift access from the entrance to the roof. Padel deserves a mention because it has become the social currency of Spanish residential complexes, and a court on site is the difference between a holiday where the teenagers vanish onto screens and one where they vanish onto a court.
Punta Prima itself is a small, well-established resort at the northern end of the Orihuela Costa, immediately south of the Torrevieja boundary. The beach carried a Blue Flag in 2026, one of ten awarded across Orihuela's coastline, alongside La Zenia-Cala Bosque, Cabo Roig, Campoamor and Mil Palmeras. That density of certified beaches inside one municipality is unusual, and it is not decorative: it reflects water quality, lifeguard provision, access and facilities that have to be reapplied for every season.
What a one-eighth share actually gives you
The structure is the same one that runs through every property listed by COP. The house is bought outright by a dedicated company, in Spain usually a sociedad limitada, which holds the deed. The company is divided into eight shares. Each share is deeded property: it can be sold, left in a will, and in some cases used as security. Owning one gives you roughly 44 nights a year in the home, allocated through a rotating calendar that moves peak weeks between owners from year to year, so nobody is permanently assigned the second week of November.
The running costs are divided by eight and paid as a single annual management fee. It covers the community charges, IBI and other local taxes, insurance, utilities, internet, cleaning and linen between stays, maintenance, the reserve for replacing what wears out, and the professional management that keeps all of it moving. The arrangement removes the two things that make second homes wearing at a distance: the administration, and the sense that a house left empty for eleven months is deteriorating out of sight.
What co-ownership does not do is turn a holiday home into an investment product. A share is bought for use. It may appreciate with the market, and this market has been appreciating, but the honest case for it is the cost of comfortable, reliable, well-managed access to a coast you want to return to, rather than a yield.
The coast Europe keeps buying
Alicante province is the most internationally traded property market in Spain, and by a wide margin. Registrars' data put the foreign share of home purchases in the province at 44.65% in the first quarter of 2026, having run at about 45.7% across 2025. Nationally, foreign buyers completed close to 97,500 purchases in 2025, a record, and roughly one in four of those transactions happened in Alicante.
The nationalities are worth knowing, because they shape the neighbourhood. In the final quarter of 2025 the largest groups buying in Spain were British, Dutch, German, Moroccan, Romanian, Italian, French and Belgian, with no single nationality above 8%. The southern Costa Blanca is the most Northern European stretch of Spanish coast, and it has been for forty years, which is why the supermarkets stock rye bread and the bars show Eredivisie football. Buyers who want an untouched Spanish fishing village should look elsewhere on this site. Buyers who want easy familiarity, English and German spoken everywhere, and a January that works, are looking at the right listing.
Air access is the underwriting fact. Alicante-Elche recorded 126,081 aircraft movements in 2025 and served just under 20 million passengers, with routes from almost every mid-sized city in Britain, Ireland, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia. The drive from the terminal to Punta Prima runs about forty-five minutes on the AP-7. Cheap, frequent, year-round flights are what convert a holiday home from an annual pilgrimage into a long weekend, and they are the reason a four-day trip in February is realistic here in a way it is not on most of the Mediterranean.
A year in forty-four nights
The southern Costa Blanca is one of the few European coasts where the shoulder seasons are the best of it, which changes how a share is worth using. February and March deliver daytime temperatures that make lunch outside comfortable and the sea too cold for anything but the determined. The golf courses are busy and the restaurants are open, because a substantial resident population of Northern European retirees keeps them open. A week here in winter is not a compromise. It is arguably the point.
April to June is the coast at its best: warm water from late May, long light, the lagoons at their most vivid, the beaches busy but not full. September and October repeat the trick in reverse, and the fact that Alicante's single busiest month in 2025 was October rather than August tells you the market has already worked this out. August is the exception. It is hot, crowded and loud, family holiday season for Spain as well as for the rest of Europe, and it should be chosen deliberately rather than by default.
Forty-four nights spends well against that calendar: a fortnight in summer, a week at Easter, a week in October and a long winter break, with a few nights left over for a spontaneous flight in November. Owners who fly from a hub with several daily services often break their allocation into more, shorter trips, which is the pattern that makes a home like this earn its keep. The rooftop, incidentally, is the reason the winter weeks work at all, since a heated jacuzzi with a sea view in February is a materially different proposition from a communal pool nobody is using.
The price, tested against the local market
Idealista's May 2026 figures put asking prices on the Orihuela Costa at €3,037 per square metre. Neighbouring Torrevieja sat at €2,548, up 16.6% year on year, and the provincial average was €2,811, up 11.5%. Those are asking prices rather than achieved ones, and they blend a wide range of stock, from 1970s apartments needing rewiring to new-build front-line homes. New-build penthouses of this type in Punta Prima, with a private solarium and a sea view, are generally advertised between €300,000 and €500,000, with premium two-bedroom examples marketed from about €425,000.
Set the share price against that honestly. Eight shares at €125,000 total €1 million, which is more than a comparable penthouse asks on the open market in this postcode. That gap is not a valuation of the bricks. It reflects what the share price actually bundles: the property bought and paid for outright with no mortgage over it, the full furnishing and decoration, the legal structure and its formation costs, the reserve fund for future capital works, the first year of management, and the operator's margin for assembling all of it. A share is a packaged product, and it should be judged as one.
The comparison that does the real work is the cost of use. Buying a comparable penthouse outright at, say, €400,000 means finding that €400,000, plus purchase taxes and fees, then carrying community charges, IBI, insurance, utilities, maintenance and either your own time or a management company for twelve months a year in exchange for the six or seven weeks you will realistically spend there. Renting the equivalent gets expensive quickly too: holiday lets in Punta Prima are advertised from around €630 a week, and two-bedroom apartments on the Orihuela Costa change hands at roughly €800 a week in July and August, before you count the years when the dates you want are gone by February.
There is a further point that buyers of whole apartments on this coast discover late. A holiday flat used for six weeks a year still needs someone to hold keys, meet the plumber, chase the community administrator, deal with the water company when a bill goes unpaid in a month you were not there, and clean before and after each arrival. Either you pay a local management company a four-figure sum each year for that service, or you spend the first day of every trip on the phone. Shared ownership resolves it by making professional management structural rather than optional, and by splitting its cost eight ways.
Between those two positions sits €125,000 of deeded property, 44 nights a year in a specific home you can leave your own things in, and a fee that arrives once and covers everything. Whether that is good value depends entirely on how often you will genuinely come. Four weeks a year and it is compelling. One week a year and you should rent.
A tax change worth knowing about
The Valencian Community moved its property transaction taxes this summer. For deeds formalised from 1 June 2026, the general rate of impuesto de transmisiones patrimoniales on resale homes fell from 10% to 9%, with 11% applying above a €1 million value, and stamp duty, actos jurídicos documentados, came down from 1.5% to 1.4%. New-build purchases continue to attract 10% IVA plus that AJD rate. The relevant date is the date of the deed, not the date the private contract was signed, which has caught out buyers who assumed the reverse.
On a €400,000 resale, the one-point cut in ITP saves €4,000; on a new build, where the 10% IVA is untouched, the smaller stamp-duty cut saves €400. It is not a reason to buy, but it is a fair illustration of the frictional cost of full ownership on this coast: buying a new-build penthouse outright means paying something in the order of €45,000 in tax before the notary, the registry and the lawyer are paid. In a co-ownership structure those costs sit inside the share price, already paid, which is part of what closes the apparent gap between €125,000 and one-eighth of an open-market asking price.
What lies within twenty minutes
La Zenia is a few minutes south by car, and with it the largest shopping centre on this part of the coast, along with the run of beach restaurants at Cala Bosque. Cabo Roig, further down, has the marina and the long-established beach clubs. North, Torrevieja provides the working town: a proper market, a seafront promenade, a hospital, and enough ordinary Spanish commerce to remind you that people live here in February.
The strangest thing to see nearby is inland, and worth the twenty-minute drive. The natural park of the La Mata and Torrevieja lagoons covers about 3,700 hectares, protected since 1994. The larger lagoon, at roughly 1,400 hectares, is the pink one: its colour comes from Dunaliella salina, a micro-alga that releases reddish pigments in strong light and high salinity, and from the archaea that share the water with it. La Mata, at around 700 hectares, stays greener. Flamingos work both. Salt has been harvested here since the thirteenth century, and the industrial pans still operate, which gives the whole site the strange double character of a nature reserve inside a working saltworks.
Eating well takes a little local knowledge, as it does anywhere with heavy tourist turnover. The rule that works on this coast is to drive twenty minutes inland or ten minutes into the Spanish part of town. Torrevieja's covered market and the Friday street market are where the resident population shops, and the Vega Baja behind the coast is serious agricultural country, supplying artichokes, citrus and the salt itself. Rice cooked over vine wood in the villages around the Mar Menor, arroz a banda in the port restaurants, and the local salazones, salt-cured fish, are all worth the detour from the beachfront menus.
Golf is dense here: Villamartín, Las Ramblas, Campoamor and Las Colinas are all within a short drive, and green fees on the Costa Blanca remain markedly cheaper than on the Costa del Sol. Murcia's Corvera airport offers a second arrival option about an hour away. Cartagena, with its Roman theatre and naval history, makes an easy day out, and the Segura valley towns of Orihuela and Elche, the latter with its palm grove listed by UNESCO, another.
The case for and against
In favour: this is the most accessible warm-winter coast in continental Europe for Northern European owners, with the flight economics to prove it. The home is new, turnkey and on the top floor, which removes the two most common regrets in Spanish apartment ownership, namely dated fittings and someone walking about above you. The solarium is genuinely large. The complex has the facilities that keep a family occupied on the days when nobody wants to move the car. The share price sits at the accessible end of the COP range, which matters if this is a first purchase abroad rather than a fifth.
Against: the Orihuela Costa is a built environment, not a wild one. August is busy, hot and loud, and the beaches at Punta Prima are small enough to fill. Buyers looking for the architectural drama of Mallorca or the pine-and-dune quiet of the Portuguese coast will find this coast plainer. And the resale market for shares is younger and thinner than the resale market for whole apartments, so anyone who might need to exit quickly should read the exit terms with care before committing.
One further caution belongs here, because it applies to every new residence on this coast and not only to this one. A gated complex sold largely to holiday owners has a different community life from one with year-round residents, and the quality of the community administration matters enormously to how the pools, gardens and lifts are kept over a decade. In a shared structure that responsibility is absorbed by the manager, who attends the meetings and votes the interest of the house, which is one of the less advertised advantages of the arrangement. It is still worth asking how the wider community is run before you commit.
Set against that, the numbers are what they are. Nearly half of everyone buying a home in this province is a foreigner. The airport had its best year on record and its busiest month in October rather than August, which tells you how long the season now runs. Prices in the neighbouring municipality rose 16.6% in a year. This is not a market waiting to be discovered, and it does not price as though it is.
Practical notes before you enquire
Three things are worth doing before a share purchase in Spain rather than after. Apply for your NIE, the foreigner's tax identification number, since nothing formal proceeds without it and appointments thin out over the summer. Assemble the documentation showing where your purchase funds came from, because the checks are now standard on every European property transaction and are the most common source of delay. And decide, before you look at the calendar rules, which weeks actually matter to you, since a family tied to school holidays and a retired couple with an open diary get very different value from the same share.
It is also sensible to visit twice, in different months, before committing. The southern Costa Blanca in mid-February and the same streets in mid-August are close to different places, and the version you fall for should be the version you will actually inhabit. Anyone whose weeks are dictated by school terms is buying the crowded, expensive end of the year and should test it honestly. Anyone with a flexible diary is buying the best-value warm-weather access in Europe, and should be careful not to judge it on an August visit.
Ownership of a share is registered, so it passes under a will like any other asset, and Spanish succession rules and the applicable inheritance tax should be discussed with your own adviser at the point of purchase rather than left for later. None of this is difficult. It simply goes more smoothly when it is done in the right order.
Full details, photographs, the floor plan and the current availability of shares are on the Punta Prima penthouse listing, and if you would like the annual cost breakdown, the calendar mechanics or a viewing arranged, our contact page will reach us directly.
