Marbella

Old Town · Calle Pantaleón 4, Local 1

El Bordón is what happens when dinner stops respecting the boundaries of the restaurant. Manuel, the owner, may suddenly grab a guitar and start singing. Not austere, museum-piece flamenco performed at a respectful distance, but loud, lively flamenco that immediately drags the whole room into it. Rebujito starts moving faster. People clap. Someone stands up. Tables become percussion. A meal becomes an Andalusian party before anyone can identify the moment it changed. The place is tiny enough that your table may simply be a barrel, and on busy nights the whole thing spills out onto the street. Flamenco figures including El Cigala and Tomatito have been known to pass through, which tells you something about the room: this is not flamenco arranged for visitors so much as a place flamenco people actually enjoy inhabiting. Crucially, the food has not been sacrificed to the spectacle. You can still eat extremely well while the volume keeps rising around you. Come for dinner. Leave whenever the street gives the restaurant back.

Playa El Ancón · N-340, km 177

The entrance to Victor's is a rough track off one of the most expensive stretches of coastline in Europe. Down by Playa El Ancón, it belongs to an older species of Marbella: chiringuito, sand, cold drinks, Mediterranean plates and an afternoon whose principal architectural feature is the sea. Nearby development has become increasingly polished; Victor's has never seemed particularly troubled by the competition. Even the old Torre Ancón still sits above the beach among eucalyptus trees. Stay through sunset for the track, the beach, the cold drinks and the light. Marbella has invented far more elaborate ways to spend an afternoon, but none of that improves the sea.

Puente Romano Beach Resort, Bulevar Príncipe Alfonso von Hohenlohe s/n, 29602 Marbella

Puente Romano contains more than twenty restaurants and bars: Nobu, the first Spanish location, Leña, Sea Grill, COYA, Cipriani, La Petite Maison, Chiringuito, GAIA and others orbiting La Plaza. By night DJs play in the square, Nobu dishes can be ordered there and cocktails continue until 3 a.m. The useful fact is geographic. You can move between major restaurants, bars and La Plaza without leaving the resort or crossing a public road. Make one reservation, but choose it for the food; the rest of Puente Romano will remain within a few minutes' walk.

Calle Playa del Cable s/n, 29603 Marbella

Playa Padre has body painting. It also books DJs including Black Coffee, Satori, Monolink, Shimza and THEMBA. This is useful information because somewhere between those two facts lies the entire proposition. The place begins on the sand with Balinese beds, Mediterranean food with Mexican influence, tequila, mezcal and all the usual promises beach clubs make about surrendering to the rhythm of the sea. Then the music takes control. Sundays in particular are treated less like lunch than a small electronic festival that happens to possess tables and access to the Mediterranean. Subtlety was considered. A DJ was booked instead. Stay.

Urbanización Villa Parra Palomeras 68, 29602 Marbella

Momento is a landscaped open-air compound on the Golden Mile with a restaurant, cocktails, DJs and a club that takes over around midnight. The practical advantage is simple: the restaurant and club share one property, so there is no second car, queue or entrance to negotiate. Ignore the venue's language about mystical connection and beautiful souls. Check who is playing and book for the music. Dinner is the first function of the building, not its entire purpose.

Marbella Club Hotel, Bulevar Príncipe Alfonso de Hohenlohe s/n, 29602 Marbella

There are places where old money is an interior-design style. The Grill has the unfair advantage of actual history. Marbella Club began in 1954 as Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe's twenty-room Mediterranean retreat and helped invent the version of Marbella that later attracted aristocrats, actors, musicians, millionaires and eventually a large global industry dedicated to imitating their holidays. The Grill still sits beneath tall pines in the gardens, with silver service, candles that have been burning through decades of dinners and a grill master following the work of his father, Roque. Nothing here needs to know what year it is. Dress properly. Eat outside. Order something that has encountered fire. Let the waiters do their jobs. Marbella has become louder, richer, newer and vastly more complicated around it. The pines remain unimpressed.