Málaga Airport to Benalmádena is the shortest airport run on the Costa del Sol – 15 to 20 km, around 20 minutes, and the only one of the three western resorts with a train. It is also the one most guides get mechanically wrong.
The Cercanías C1 runs direct from the airport to Benalmádena-Arroyo de la Miel with no change at any point. And the taxi fare is not one number: the official destination tariff prices Benalmádena Costa and Benalmádena Pueblo separately, about €7 apart by day and nearly €9 apart at night.
An earlier version of this page told you to change trains at Málaga Centro-Alameda and quoted a flat €20–30 for the taxi. Both were wrong, and the second matters more than it looks – which Benalmádena you are staying in changes the price of every option below.
Private transfer from Malaga Airport to Benalmádena
Compare taxi and private transfer prices from Malaga Airport to Benalmádena. Fixed price, no surprises. Directly here on LetsGoMalaga.
- Fixed price – no hidden fees
- Door-to-door hotel pickup
- Free cancellation
Which Benalmadena are you going to?
Three places share the name and they are not walking distance from each other. Settle this before you price anything.
Benalmádena Costa is the seafront strip – the marina, the hotel blocks, most of the tourist accommodation. It is what almost everyone means by Benalmádena, and every form of transport serves it directly.
Benalmádena Pueblo is the whitewashed hilltop village a few kilometres inland and several hundred metres up. No bus and no train reaches it from the airport: getting there is a road journey, or a road journey plus a second road journey.
Arroyo de la Miel is the residential town in between, and it is where the railway station is.
The airport taxi tariff reflects that geography, which is why a single quoted fare for "Benalmádena" is meaningless. These are the published destination rates as of July 2026:
| Destination | Weekday daytime | Night, weekend, public holiday |
|---|---|---|
| Benalmádena Costa | €22.02 | €25.10 |
| Benalmádena Pueblo | €29 | €34 |
Arroyo de la Miel is not listed separately and sits between the two, both geographically and in price. The gap between Costa and Pueblo is the uphill run inland – short in kilometres, slow in practice, and the reason the Pueblo is the one destination here where a pre-booked car is the obvious answer rather than one option among several.
If you are staying in the Pueblo, put "Benalmádena Pueblo centro" in the drop-off field when you book, not just "Benalmádena". A driver who defaults to the Costa will get you within four kilometres of your hotel and a long way below it.
Is there a direct train to Benalmadena?
Yes, and this is the correction worth reading twice. The C1 line runs Málaga Centro-Alameda – María Zambrano – Aeropuerto – Torremolinos – Benalmádena-Arroyo de la Miel – Torremuelle – Carvajal – Fuengirola, on one through service. The airport and Benalmádena are on the same line in the same direction. You board at the airport station and stay on the train. Older advice about changing at Málaga Centro-Alameda has you travelling into the city and back out again for no reason.
The second thing to get right is which station. Torremuelle and Benalmádena-Arroyo de la Miel are two separate stops, one after the other, and it is Arroyo de la Miel that matches the town of that name and puts you in the middle of it. Torremuelle is further down the coast and serves a residential stretch rather than anything you are likely to have booked.
Trains run roughly every 20 to 30 minutes, with the first service around 05:20 and the last around 23:30, seven days a week. That first departure matters: it is the only way out of Málaga Airport before about 08:00 that is not a car.
Renfe prices Cercanías by zone – €1.80, €2.05, €2.70 and €3.60 across one to five zones – but publishes no station-to-zone map, so the exact airport-to-Arroyo fare cannot be quoted from the official tariff. Aggregators put it at €2.20 to €2.70, cheap enough that the precise figure changes nothing. Buy at the machine on the platform.
The catch is the last mile: Arroyo de la Miel station is roughly 2 km from the Costa beachfront and 3 to 4 km from the Pueblo, uphill in the second case. Perfect if Arroyo is your destination, an extra taxi if it is not.
How much is a taxi from Malaga Airport to Benalmadena?
Licensed white taxis queue outside Terminal 3 around the clock, and the fares in the table above are the whole fare – Málaga's airport supplement applies to journeys to the airport, not from it. Journeys starting at the airport use higher minimum fares instead, and those minimums are already baked into the destination rates.
There is no toll to add either. Taxis take the A-7 coastal road west; the AP-7 toll plazas start at Calahonda, well past Benalmádena, so nothing appears on top of the meter the way it does on the Marbella and Estepona runs further west.
At €22.02 for a daytime run to the Costa, the taxi is genuinely competitive here in a way it is not anywhere else on this coast. Two people with a bag each, staying on the seafront, arriving at a civilised hour: take the taxi and stop reading.
Which airport bus actually serves Benalmadena?
This is murkier than most guides admit, and worth being straight about.
Flybus is the shuttle usually named. Its own Málaga Airport page lists Torremolinos, Puerto Banús and Estepona and does not list Benalmádena Costa among its published routes for 2026. Aggregator data shows a regular service at around €9–10 one way, roughly 18 minutes, with about 16 departures a day. That may well be running, but the operator's own route page does not confirm it – verify at the point of booking rather than building an arrival around it.
Line M-110 is the better-documented option. It is a CTMAM local bus, confirmed in operation through 2026, running Málaga – Torremolinos – Benalmádena Costa with stops along the whole seafront strip: Puerto Marina, Bil-Bil, Selwo Marina, Sunset Beach Club, Torrequebrada, Torrenueva. Between 21 June and 8 September 2026 it runs a reinforced summer timetable of up to 76 services on weekdays and Saturdays, with night departures running as late as 03:10 from Málaga and 04:05 from Torrenueva.
Two honest caveats. Its airport stop is Cruce Aeropuerto, the junction on the main road rather than a stand at the terminal door, so there is a walk with your bags at the start. And CTMAM publishes fares by zone crossing without mapping M-110's stops to zones, so no exact fare or segment time for this leg can be quoted – budget a few euros and 35 to 45 minutes.
For an overnight arrival in high summer, though, it is the only public transport still moving.
Private transfer: what you are paying the extra for
Private transfers here sit in a market range of about €40 to €65 for a standard car or minivan – commercial prices rather than a regulated tariff, so they move with demand and season in a way the taxi table does not. Against a €22.02 taxi, that is the widest proportional gap of any route on this coast, and it makes the recommendation conditional rather than automatic.
What you are buying is a named driver waiting in arrivals, a price agreed before you fly, and a drop-off at an exact address rather than a town. Two of those three are worth little on a daytime arrival to a seafront hotel. All three are worth a lot at 01:00, with children, or when the address is 200 metres up a Pueblo lane a driver will need directions for.
Kiwitaxi is the operator behind the prices quoted here. The practical reason to use it over a generic broker is what happens after you book: you can track your assigned driver, and change or reschedule the pickup online rather than phoning a call centre in another country. Its driver ratings run consistently high because the same drivers get rebooked on the strength of them.
Booking ahead is also what locks the price. The fare is fixed at the moment you book and the flight is tracked automatically, so a delayed landing neither costs you extra nor leaves you at the back of the rank.
You are heading to Benalmádena Pueblo, arriving after midnight, travelling with small children or more luggage than hands, or you simply want the arrival settled before you leave home. The Pueblo case is the strongest: it is the one address here that public transport does not reach at all.
You are one or two people with light bags, landing in daylight, staying on the Costa strip. The €22.02 taxi puts you at the same door for less, and the C1 train from Arroyo de la Miel costs about a tenth of it. This is the shortest run on the coast and it does not need solving.
Hiring a car instead
Benalmádena works better as a driving base than most of the coast: it sits where the A-7 is still free, with Torremolinos and Fuengirola either side and Málaga city twenty minutes back east, and not a toll on any of it.
The counter-argument is parking. The Costa strip has workable seafront parking; the Pueblo has lanes laid out for donkeys, where a car is an active liability. The Málaga car hire guide covers the excess and fuel-policy terms that decide whether a €25 daily rate is really €25.
Once you are there, the Benalmádena cable car up Monte Calamorro is the one attraction worth planning a day around. For the other routes from the airport, see the Málaga Airport transfers hub; for how meet-and-greet and VIP services work in general, the airport transfer guide goes further than this page does.
