Truly memorable hotels are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. In some ineffable alchemy of design, service, landscape, amenities and often a personality or two (an owner, manager or cult bartender), the greats are great because they are more than mere locations. They become ideas to us, ones about what it means to live in real style – to shed our prosaic selves and, for a few days, be the chicer and more cultivated ones we all long to believe lurk inside us.

Such cynosures of hotel perfection are, in real life, few and far between, despite the astounding rate at which ultra-luxury hospitality is proliferating across the world. Many of the qualities these shiny new addresses try to evince – culture, patina, a sense of defining the place they’re in – are cribbed (not always successfully) straight from the playbooks of their oldest and most established counterparts, a cohort of legends so rare you could count them on two hands: usually independent, often family-owned, invariably in business for a minimum of several decades. And sitting right near the top of the list is the Marbella Club hotel, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, founded in 1954 by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe-Langenburg.