Iona Napier
NO-ONE would contest the fact that Estepona is easy on the eye.
With a mural collection of the most off-the-wall urban art on the Costa del Sol and a host of impressive statues and fountains, there’s no denying it.
At the end of last year the town hall unveiled its latest purchase: a €50,000 gold-plated statue of two embracing lovers standing on the main roundabout on Avenida Juan Carlos I.
Some find it a bit ‘Dirty Dancing’ and others think it’s downright wasteful, but keeping up appearances has always been high on the town hall’s agenda.
Take the cheery plant pots, for example, which have seen Estepona transformed into the secret garden of the Costa del Sol.
Other statues pepper the town from naked female figurines in Calle Real, Plaza Ortiz and Plaza Blas Infante to the scholarly gentleman sat on a beachside bench, good company but a little lacking in conversation.
Two moving wartime tributes can be found on Plaza Almengual and on an Avenida Litoral roundabout – in fact, the majority of the town’s roundabouts are beautifully decorated.
If sculpture’s not your thing, the murals are incredibly diverse and have been painted by anyone from top international artists to creative prison inmates.
Every other high rise is bursting with colour and imaginative designs – from dancers and divers to optical illusions which deceive the eye from a distance.
A particularly realistic recent addition to the ‘Artistic Murals Route’ is a gardener cutting bougainvillea on the side of Victor de la Serna school by Jaen painter Jose Fernandez Ros.
The impressive ‘Fishing Day’ mural, also by award-winning Jose Fernandez, occupies 1,000m2 across six separate buildings – and holds the record for the largest vertical mural in Spain.
There are now 24 murals but keep an eye out as you never know when a creative Esteponero will take their palette and create another colourful corner of bliss in this photogenic town.
