The Marbella Club at 70

A repeat guest admires the famed Spanish retreat's remarkable staying power

The Marbella Club in 1989
The Marbella Club in 1989
(Image credit: Tom Stoddart Archive / Getty Images)

Seventy years ago, the world changed – at least it did for the sybaritic elite that used to go by the name of Café Society but would soon be re-classified in the social taxonomy as the jet set: 1954 was the year that the Marbella Club opened.

The story had begun almost a decade earlier when, one chilly winter's day in 1946, Prince Max von Hohenlohe fired up his charcoal-burning Rolls-Royce Phantom and drove south from a 90-room palace just outside Madrid.

He was in search of the sun and his cousin Ricardo Soriano, Marqués de Ivanrey, a polymathic sports fisherman, inventor, powerboat racer and ladies' man, who was busy living what today we would call his best life on what is now the Costa del Sol.

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I like to tell people that barefoot luxury is nothing new, it just used to be called "the Marbella Club". Today, of course, expectations of hotels are somewhat higher than they were in the Marbella Club's early days of hip baths and headboards painted on the walls of monastically simple guest rooms. But even though it may move with the times – it now has its own Chanel store and Louis Vuitton boutique, and is shortly to open a Loewe – there is also a sui generis spirit of timelessness that pervades the place.

Among those staff was nonagenarian nobleman Rudolf Graf von Schönburg, or Count Rudi as he is universally known, who joined the hotel as manager in 1957 and never left. Even now, he can be seen pottering about the club. It is as if he is the human incarnation of the low whitewashed bungalows punctuating the lush greenery of the gardens.

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Nick Foulkes is an author, historian and journalist. He is a Contributing Editor at HTSI and Vanity Fair, and a columnist for Country Life.