Adult entry to Colomares Castle is €3.50, and children and pensioners pay €2.50. Both went up from €3.00 and €2.00, which is the pair of numbers still printed across the Benalmádena guides – including this page until today.
The second thing to know before you drive up is that nothing here is old. Every stone was laid between 1987 and 1994 by a local doctor, Esteban Martín Martín, working with two masons. It reads as a 13th-century fortress from the car park and it is younger than most of the hotels on the coast below. Every price and hour on this page was checked against the monument's own site on 19 August 2026.
Every 2026 price
| Ticket | Price |
|---|---|
| Adult | €3.50 |
| Child or pensioner | €2.50 |
| Group of 25 or more, per person | €2.00 |
| Guided talk added to a group booking, per person | €0.50 |
There is no online checkout and no timed entry. You turn up, you pay at the gate, you walk in – the only thing that needs arranging in advance is the group rate, which starts at 25 people and is booked by phone on +34 602 44 15 71 or by email to reservascolomares@hotmail.com.
If a guide quotes you €3, it is reading an old page
The opening hours, and the Monday that catches people out
The monument runs three separate timetables across the year, and closes on Mondays in all of them.
- Summer: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–14:00 and 17:00–21:00
- Spring: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–20:00
- Autumn and winter: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–18:00
- Every Monday, all year: closed
The summer split is the one that ruins plans. From roughly midday the castle shuts for five hours, which is exactly the window most people on the coast decide to go somewhere inland. Arriving at 15:00 in August means a locked gate and a drive back down.
The official page labels those seasons but does not print the dates it switches between them, so in the changeover weeks of March and October the sensible move is a phone call rather than an assumption.
The doctor who spent seven years on it
Esteban Martín Martín started building in 1987 with two masons from nearby Mijas, Juan Blanco and Domingo Núñez. The three of them worked for seven years and finished in 1994.
It is a monument to Christopher Columbus and the voyages that connected Europe to the Americas, built as a sort of argument in stone: towers, archways, mosaic panels and inscriptions borrowing from Gothic, Mudéjar, Romanesque and Byzantine styles at once.
None of it tries very hard to belong to a single century, which purists find infuriating. It is also the reason the place is worth the drive – there is nothing else like it on this coast, and no committee would ever have approved it.
The smallest church in the world, and what an exterior visit means
Inside the complex is the Iglesia de Santa Isabel de Hungría, which at 1.96 m² holds the Guinness World Record for the smallest church in the world. It sits high in the structure, it fits one person at a time, and it has an altar and religious detail rather than being a novelty shell.
One honest note before you build a visit around it. The official ticket page carries a line saying the monument is visited de manera exterior únicamente – on an exterior basis only.
The most likely reading is that a normal ticket buys a self-guided walk around the grounds, courtyards and towers, as distinct from the paid guided talk that groups book by phone. Spanish press coverage through 2026 still describes the tiny church as part of an ordinary visit.
But the line is on the official page, we cannot make it say more than it says, and if the church is the whole reason you are going, ring first.
Turning up or booking a guide
Work down until a line matches you.
- If your free day in Benalmádena is a Monday
Pick something else – it is closed.
Every Monday of the year, in every season. The Stupa up the hill closes on Mondays too, so a Monday in the Pueblo is really a lunch and a viewpoint.
Where to eat up there instead - If you just want to see the thing
€3.50 at the gate, nothing to book.
Allow 45 to 60 minutes for the full circuit at a normal pace, longer if you stop to read the inscriptions. There is no official audio guide, so the panels and your own eyes are the whole commentary.
- If you want the inscriptions and the symbolism explained
The 40-minute guided entry is the only way to get it.
€9 per person on GetYourGuide with the €3.50 entry included, in English or Spanish, meeting at the castle gate. So the commentary itself costs you about €5.50 – which on a building this deliberately symbolic is most of what you came for. 40 minutes, rated 4.7 across 762 reviews.
Check tour availability - If you are 25 or more people
€2.00 each, and add the talk for €0.50.
The group rate has to be arranged ahead by phone on +34 602 44 15 71 – it is not something the gate can apply on the day. The guided talk is an optional extra on top of the group price, not a separate tour.
Getting there from the coast
The castle stands at Finca La Carraca, Ctra. Costa del Sol s/n, 29639 Benalmádena, next to Benalmádena Pueblo and roughly 6 km up from the beach. It is not a walk from the sea front, and the road up is steep enough that it should not be attempted as one.
- By taxi: around nine minutes from Benalmádena Costa, and the simplest option if you are not driving. Ranks at Puerto Marina and along the main strip.
- By bus: services from Arroyo de la Miel run up to Benalmádena Pueblo, leaving a short uphill walk. Timetables shift with the season, so check them locally rather than trusting a number printed anywhere.
- By car: follow signs for Benalmádena Pueblo off the A-7. Parking near the entrance is reported by visitors but the official site confirms neither its capacity nor whether it is free, so treat it as a question to answer on arrival.
It is 500 metres from the Stupa Benalmádena, which is free, and a short walk from the butterfly house, which is not. All three in one morning is the standard Pueblo half-day, and the things to do in Benalmádena guide sets that against the cable car and the marina if you only have one day inland.
Is €3.50 worth it?
Yes, and the price is low enough that the question barely deserves asking – the real cost of Colomares is the taxi up, not the ticket.
Set your expectations at the right building, though. This is not history, it is one man's monument, and visitors who arrive wanting a Moorish fortress leave puzzled. What you get instead is close-up craftsmanship: mosaic work you can put your face against, inscriptions carved with real care, a genuinely strange Guinness-record chapel, and a terrace view down over the coast that costs more than €3.50 at any bar in Puerto Marina.
Sixty minutes, half of a Pueblo morning, and the most interesting thing anyone has built in Benalmádena in living memory. The rest of the village – the stupa, the church, the restaurants that are better than anything on the strip – is in the Benalmádena Pueblo guide, and the free things to do in Benalmádena page covers what you can add without paying at all.
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