Once a Year, a Quarry Above Marbella Becomes a Ballroom

Marbella has no shortage of summer parties. It has exactly one quarry, and one night a year, that is the point.

The Starlite Gala takes place tonight, its seventeenth edition, at the Starlite Auditorium — an open-air amphitheater cut into the Cantera de Nagüeles, a former stone quarry on the lower slopes of the Sierra Blanca above the town. The site has a history longer than Starlite itself: in 1983, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe organized a concert here with Julio Iglesias and Plácido Domingo, three decades before Sandra García-Sanjuán and Ignacio Maluquer built the modern festival on the same ground in 2012. The Gala predates even that — Banderas has hosted it since 2010, the one evening of the summer season set aside entirely for the Starlite Foundation rather than ticket sales.

This year's theme, "Peace & Love," frames an evening built around the Foundation's Solidarity Awards, a charity auction, and a run of musical performances, presented by Valeria Mazza and Bertín Osborne. The proceeds go toward the education, health, and social projects the Foundation funds year-round, largely out of view of the gala itself. At midnight, by now a fixed part of the format, the room turns to Banderas, whose birthday falls the next morning.

It is easy to read the Gala as an extension of the wider Starlite season, which fills the same quarry with concerts from June through late August. The distinction is worth keeping: the festival sells tickets to a stage; the Gala, for one night, sells the quarry itself back to the town that lends it — a closed circle of guests underwriting a foundation whose work has nothing to do with the summer calendar it is named for. Marbella spends the season photographed at Puerto Banús and Puente Romano. Tonight, the more interesting picture is the one from higher up the hill, where the stone remembers 1983 as clearly as it does last week.

— Camille