A reading of registered transactions on the Costa del Sol over the last 36 months, with attention to the share of Nordic buyers and how it has changed since 2022.
There is a comfortable story about Scandinavians and southern Spain. Sun, golf, a flight that is barely longer than the one to the family cabin, and a coast that has been absorbing Northern European money for half a century. It is true as far as it goes. But it is also the kind of story that lets people stop looking at the numbers, and the numbers from the last three years are more interesting — and in places more counter-intuitive — than the postcard suggests.
So this is an attempt to read the registered data plainly, separate what has genuinely changed since 2022 from what has merely been written about more, and say something useful to a Nordic buyer trying to decide whether they are early, on time, or late.
The backdrop: foreign demand at a structural high
Start with the wide frame. Across Spain, foreign buyers now account for roughly 14–15% of all residential transactions — the highest share ever recorded. In the first half of 2025, overseas buyers purchased more than 71,000 homes nationally, up around 2% year-on-year. That is the ceiling of the funnel.
The Costa del Sol sits far above that national average. In Málaga province, depending on the quarter and the source, between a third and four in ten purchases involve an international buyer; notary figures for the second quarter of 2025 put the foreign share at around 33%, and full-year 2024 estimates run closer to 39% — the highest of any Spanish province. Climb into the prime municipalities and the figure stops being a statistic and becomes the whole market. In Benahavís, Spain’s notaries record international buyers at roughly 84% of all residential transactions. Anyone marketing a well-located home above the regional median here is, in practice, marketing to a foreign audience whether they intend to or not.
That is the soil. The question is what the Nordic plant looks like in it.
What the Nordic data actually shows
Here the honest answer requires separating two countries that the Spanish press habitually lumps together as “the Scandinavians.”
Sweden is the volume story. Across the western coast — Fuengirola, Mijas, Marbella, Benahavís and Estepona — Swedish nationals completed an estimated 1,212 transactions in the twelve months to September 2025, which makes them one of the most influential single foreign groups on this stretch. The concentration is striking: in Fuengirola, Swedish buyers account for close to 14% of all foreign transactions, and even in prime Benahavís they make up around 10% of international purchases. On a national basis Swedes have long represented roughly 5% of all foreign buyers.
Norway is the value story, and it is easy to under-read. In the raw national tables Norwegians have historically registered at little more than 1% of foreign buyers — roughly a quarter of the Swedish count. Taken at face value, that looks like a marginal market. It isn’t, for three reasons.
First, price. When notaries rank foreign buyers by the average price paid per square metre, Norwegians sit at the very top of the table — around €3,292/m² in the first half of 2025, behind only American, Swiss and Swedish buyers and comfortably ahead of most of the volume nationalities. Norwegian money lands disproportionately in the premium and prime segments, which is precisely where headline transaction counts understate economic weight.
Second, measurement. The registered figures capture purchases by declared nationality at the notary; they are far less good at capturing buyers who acquire through a company, who pay cash, or who never formally register as residents despite spending half the year here. Among Swedes, unofficial estimates put the real population connected to Spain at several times the registered figure, and there is no reason to think Norwegian under-registration is smaller. The visible Norwegian number is a floor, not a true reading.
Third, product mix. Both Nordic nationalities show a pronounced appetite for new build and off-plan — roughly one Swedish buyer in five buys new — which routes a meaningful slice of demand into developments that don’t always surface cleanly in resale transaction tables.
The plain reading, then: Sweden moves the volume; Norway moves the value; and both are understated by the official count rather than overstated.
What they buy, and where
The aggregate share is only half the picture; the pattern of Nordic buying is what makes it commercially distinctive. Two features stand out.
The first is location concentration. Swedish demand in particular clusters tightly — Fuengirola and Mijas at the more accessible end, and then the prime lifestyle pockets of Marbella, especially around Nueva Andalucía and Puerto Banús, where there is an established community, familiar services and a sense of arriving somewhere already half-Nordic. Beyond a handful of municipalities, Swedish transaction volumes fall away sharply. This is not a coast-wide spread of demand; it is a deep concentration into specific zones, which is exactly why a “Costa del Sol is popular with Scandinavians” generalisation is useless for pricing a particular street.
The second is product preference. Nordic buyers — Norwegians and Swedes alike — show a marked appetite for new build and off-plan, with roughly one Swedish buyer in five choosing new. The reasons are consistent across both nationalities: a cultural preference for modern, energy-efficient, low-maintenance homes; comfort with the staged-payment structure of off-plan; and a wariness of the renovation risk that comes with older Spanish stock in an unfamiliar legal environment. For developers and for buyers’ advisers, that preference shapes everything from which inventory to surface to how a deal is structured.
What changed in 2022 — and why it is structural, not seasonal
The interesting part is the timing. Nordic interest in the coast is decades old, but the data inflects around 2022, and four forces explain why.
The first is currency. Since 2022 both the krone and the krona have weakened materially against the euro. For a buyer earning and holding wealth in NOK or SEK, a Costa del Sol villa has become more expensive in euro terms and yet the decision to buy has, if anything, accelerated — because a weak home currency reframes a euro-denominated hard asset as a hedge rather than a holiday. Property abroad stops being discretionary spending and starts looking like diversification out of a depreciating currency.
The second is the interest-rate cycle. The monetary easing that ran through the second half of 2025 lowered borrowing costs across the eurozone and improved purchasing power for financed buyers, while the prime Nordic buyer — who is frequently a cash buyer — was never especially rate-sensitive to begin with.
The third, and the one most specific to Norway, is domestic tax. The increases to Norwegian wealth tax from 2022 onward prompted a well-documented wave of high-net-worth Norwegians re-examining where they hold assets and, in some cases, where they are resident. Much of the most visible emigration went to Switzerland, but Andalucía is quietly relevant to the same calculation, because the region levies no regional wealth tax at all — a contrast we explore in detail in our tax guidance. For a Norwegian weighing a second home, the fact that the destination region does not add its own annual wealth charge is not the deciding factor, but it is rarely absent from the conversation.
The fourth is simply how people now work and live. Remote and hybrid work has turned the “second home” into something closer to a “second base” — occupied for longer stretches, by younger owners, and judged on connectivity and year-round services rather than on August alone.
None of these four is a seasonal blip. Currency regimes, tax policy, work patterns and a structural housing shortage on a land-constrained coast are slow-moving variables. That is the case for treating the post-2022 shift as a change in level rather than a spike.
The supply side keeps the thesis honest
It would be easy to read all of this as unbroken good news, so it is worth being unsentimental about the other half of the equation. The reason prices have risen — Málaga province has been among the fastest-appreciating in Spain, with asking prices up well into double digits over 2025 — is not only demand. It is that coastal municipalities face tight planning, slow permitting and genuinely limited developable land. Supply cannot respond quickly to demand, so demand expresses itself as price.
For a Nordic buyer, that cuts both ways. It supports the long-term value case, because scarcity is durable. But it also means the “wait for a correction” instinct that works in liquid, supply-elastic markets is a weaker strategy here. The corrections, when they come, tend to be shallow and short in the prime segment, and the buyer who waits is often buying the same property later at a higher number.
So: early, on time, or late?
The data does not say the Nordic buyer is late. Foreign demand is at a structural high but is still concentrated in a handful of municipalities; Norwegian participation in particular is understated and skewed to value rather than volume; and the forces that turned interest into action after 2022 are macro and slow, not faddish.
What the data does say is that this is no longer a market that rewards passivity or postcard thinking. The volume is real, the competition for the best-located stock is international and frequently in cash, and the gap between what a portal advertises and what actually transacts has widened. The advantage now sits with buyers who are precise about micro-location, clear-eyed about the tax position on both sides of the border, and represented by someone whose interests are aligned with theirs rather than with the sale.
That, for what it is worth, is the whole reason we built a Nordic practice in the first place.
Figures cited draw on data published by Spain’s notaries, Idealista, Tinsa and reporting on Costa del Sol transaction volumes through 2025. Market data is indicative and changes quarter to quarter. This note is general market commentary, not investment advice.