When I came to live in Sotogrande, there were only a few people living in this place. Indeed, it was quite a lonely place to live. However, soon I became acquainted with the owner and developer of the project, Joseph McMicking and his wife Mercedes.
McMicking had a great vision and a taste for living in a grand manner.
He told us that he was planning to make plots of eight to ten thousand square metres in the upper part of Sotogrande, the area north of main highway. In this way, he had in mind people buying these larger plots could keep their chickens and roosters and maybe a couple of horses inside their property, creating “mini fincas” within Sotogrande. This is why the section where streets start with letter “C” has plots larger than the rest.
After McMicking retired, his nephew Enrique Zobel asked him if he could buy Sotogrande from the mother company Ayala International. Once Sotogrande was sold to Enrique Zobel, it didn’t take long for it to be sold again. Greedy new investors thought this concept of mini fincas was crazy and decided to divide the land into plots of 1000m2 to 1500m2.
McMicking died heartbroken.
Because there were still not many clients around, Sotogrande offered me a large area, where now is Calle Faisan, and all surrounding areas for 12.000.000 pesetas (around 72.000 €) without the infrastructure, but with a promise that one day Sotogrande would carry out all the necessary infrastructure works. At that time, there were hardly any transactions in Sotogrande and as a joke, we could say that it was like investing in the North Pole.
After Gibraltar was re-opened for crossing into Spain, there followed a gold rush of buying and building in Sotogrande. Most of the F zone was built so fast that, in a very short time, one could hardly recognise this section.