You have to be out of the room by mid-morning. The flight isn’t until the evening. Between the two there’s a gap with nothing booked into it. Malaga is the main airport for the Costa del Sol, so a lot of people spend that gap in the back of a taxi and see nothing of the city at all. The city holds up perfectly well on its own. The centre is small and mostly flat, and everything you’d want to see sits within a walk of everything else. Seven or eight spare hours will cover a museum and a long lunch with the beach still left over.
Sorting the morning and the bags
Most places want the room back by ten or eleven, and plenty of them will hang on to your bags at reception if you ask the night before. That’s fine if you’re passing the hotel again later. On a last day you usually aren’t, and leaving bags at reception pins you to a time and a place to be back at, which is the one thing you’re trying to avoid on a day like this.
Hauling everything out to the terminal first thing ties your whole day to the airport, and the point of this day is the town. So the bags stay in the city. You arrange luggage storage in Malaga at local businesses around the centre, and there are options near the main stations. Book it the night before, while you’ve still got wifi and a free hand.
Near a station is what matters, because that’s where the day finishes. Take a small bag with you when you drop the rest off. You won’t want to be going back for the case at four in the afternoon. Swimming things and suncream if the weather’s holding. Whatever you want with you on the plane goes in there too.
The middle of the day
The middle of the day is worth giving to one thing done properly. Picasso was born here, and the Picasso Museum is the obvious anchor for the late morning. An hour is a normal visit. Longer if you read every label. Book online in summer or expect a queue. It sits in the old centre, so when you come out you’re already where you want to be for the afternoon.
The Alcazaba works just as well if you’d sooner be outside. It’s the Moorish palace-fortress on the lower slope, with the Roman theatre just below it, and the wander through the walls and gardens is a gentle one. The Gibralfaro is the castle higher up, and that climb is steep and short on shade, with the views as the reason for doing it. Take water and go earlier. If you’re here on a Sunday, check the time before you pay, because the city’s Moorish monuments have a free entry window in the afternoon.
After that the old town is mostly drifting. Calle Larios is the wide marble street everyone ends up walking down, and the better part is the tangle of narrow streets either side of it. El Pimpi, the famous old bodega by the Roman theatre, is part-owned by Antonio Banderas these days and pours sweet Malaga wine from the barrel. The covered market at Atarazanas will take ten minutes even if you’re buying nothing, and the fish counters and the noise are the reason to go in.
Lunch is the part I’d protect. Spanish lunch runs late, so a good place will still be filling up at two, and there’s no reason to sit down at one just because you feel like you’re on a schedule.
The restaurants pressed right up against the big sights are a bit of a con. Photo menus in the window and prices set by the postcode. Walk two streets back and the food gets better and cheaper at the same time. Then again, every city on this coast is built like that, and those places are there because they work. You don’t have to eat at them, is all.
The streets behind the market and back towards Larios are full of places doing fried fish and small plates. It’s the last proper meal of the trip and there’s nowhere you need to be, so give it two hours.
The beach and getting to the airport
La Malagueta is about twenty minutes on foot from the centre, and the nicest way there is along the harbour front at Muelle Uno. It’s the modern stretch, a good deal more polished than the old town, and it puts you on the sand without any real navigation. The same walk does the job in reverse later on without you thinking about it.
The chiringuitos along the sand grill espetos. Sardines threaded onto a cane and grilled over a wood fire set in an old boat on the sand. They’re the thing to eat on this coast. A plate of them with a cold beer is a fine idea even after a long lunch. If you’re not swimming, a chair and a book covers it. An hour or two on the sand is about right before you start thinking about the airport.
Getting out is the easy part. The Cercanías C1 line runs direct from the city centre to the airport in about twelve minutes, which is usually quicker than a taxi once the evening traffic starts. It costs a couple of euros and goes a few times an hour. It stops at María Zambrano, the main station, and at Centro-Alameda, the smaller central one, so wherever you’ve left your things, you’re rarely far from one of them.
Those twelve minutes are the smallest piece of the journey, and that’s where people misjudge it. You still have to collect the bags, walk to the station, wait for the next train, then get through check-in and security at the other end. It’s worth working backwards from the departure time instead of forwards from the beach. Say you want two hours in the terminal for a short-haul flight. Leave the sand three and a half hours before the flight, and everything after that happens at walking pace.
