27 Jun La Cala de Mijas – the little gem
La Cala de Mijas, the Bay of Mijas in Swedish, has developed over the years into one of the most popular and popular places for people who want to buy “a second home in the sun”. La Cala is a nice little town with just over 20,000 inhabitants between Fuengirola and Calahonda. It is seven kilometers to Fuengirola and six to Calahonda and there are three buses an hour.
The center of La Cala runs parallel to the wide white sandy beach, which also has the EU blue flag for good bathing water and well-kept beach. The beach is lined with wonderful restaurants, bars and cafes. In 2015, a boardwalk was built in the form of a walkway that connects La Cala with Calahonda, and in the future this walkway will be extended all the way to Fuengirola and Marbella.
The history of La Cala
La Cala de Mijas was from the beginning, and until the Spanish tourist boom of the 1970s, an agricultural and fishing village with typical whitewashed residential buildings. The former name La Cala del Moral (Bay of Bearberry) was changed in the 1970s to La Cala de Mijas to avoid confusion with La Cala del Moral in Rincón de la Victoria east of Málaga. From being, in the first years of tourism in the 1960s, presented in tourist brochures as a village with 25 fishermen’s huts, a few bars, a butcher, a grocery store, a small chapel, a school and an open-air cinema, today La Cala de Mijas has grown to become a pulsating paradise for sun-hungry northern Europeans and above all Scandinavians. One of the remains from old times is the lookout tower, near the beach in the center. which had great military importance in the 7th–8th centuries and onwards. Historically, La Cala with its tower was a defensive function, when enemy ships approached and the hostile Berbers often attacked Fuengirola and Benalmádena.
What can La Cala offer?
La Cala has pretty much every service you could possibly need. You get a wide range of different services such as banks, doctors, dentists, lawyers, grocery stores, bars and restaurants. There are also a number of municipal services such as libraries, schools, health centers and a cultural center. Large food chains such as Mercadona and Supersol are represented in the town, which also has its own market on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the main market place.
There is a wide range of high-class restaurants, from the simplest with a good dish of the day to more expensive ones, which include Chinese, Thai, French, Italian, Indian and of course Spanish restaurants with high quality of both food and service. The central parts of La Cala are very charming with their small, narrow streets with flower arrangements outside each gate. There is a golf course, La Noria Golf, just a few hundred meters from the town. A few kilometers up in the mountains is Spain’s largest golf facility, La Cala Golf Country Club, with three 18-hole courses, a 9-hole short course and David Leadbetter’s Golf Academy. In addition, there is a five-star hotel and its own football pitch, which is visited by many top international teams who are on training camps. When the new train line is completed from Fuengirola to Marbella, one of the stations will be in La Cala on the north side of the A7.
