Málaga - Costa del Sol Airport

Malaga Airport began in 1919, when a French airmail company called Latecoere used a field at El Rompedizo. It served as a stop on the firm's route between Toulouse and Casablanca. Regular passenger flights started in the 1920s, and in 1937 the site officially became a customs airport. For decades it remained a small field serving a quiet port city on Spain's southern coast.

That changed in the 1960s. Cheap package holidays turned the Costa del Sol into one of Europe's favorite beach destinations. Millions of British and northern European visitors began arriving every summer, and growth has kept going ever since. A terminal designed by architect Ricardo Bofill opened in 1991. A much bigger Terminal 3 followed in 2010, roughly doubling capacity and making the airport a major leisure gateway.

A second runway opened in 2012, giving the airport parallel runways for the first time, more than ninety years after the first plane landed there. Malaga is now the busiest airport in Andalusia, handling over twenty million passengers a year, with traffic weighted toward the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the Nordic countries. Low cost carriers dominate the schedule, and the airport runs year round instead of just in summer.

Malaga uses two parallel runways, meaning two strips that run side by side so planes can land and take off more often, named 12/30 and 13/31. The longer runway carries most heavy traffic. Three terminals share one roofline, with T3 handling most departures and older halls used for arrivals.

No single airline bases itself here as a hub, meaning an airport an airline uses to connect passengers between flights. Instead, low cost carriers such as Ryanair, easyJet, Vueling, Jet2, and Norwegian fly point to point across Europe. Summer weekends bring huge crowds, with flight counts far above winter levels and long waits at security and passport control.