Miirka & Milla - A Dreamy Villa Wedding in Nerja

Nerja sits at the eastern end of the Costa del Sol, where the mountains drop more steeply to the water and the town has held onto something quieter than the resort coast to the west. It is the kind of place you discover and immediately understand why someone would want to get married here.

Miirka and Milla, both from Finland, had come to Nerja on holiday years before their engagement. They had stood on the Balcón de Europa together and known - the way some decisions arrive as recognition rather than deliberation - that this was where it would happen. They found a villa above the town, on the hillside, with a terrace facing the sea and a garden fragrant with jasmine and bougainvillea.

The wedding was intimate. Forty guests, many of whom had flown from Helsinki and Tampere, gathered in a place that was completely new to most of them and immediately felt like exactly the right place. This is what Nerja does well: it welcomes people into its atmosphere without demanding effort in return.

We documented the full day in both photography and film. The preparations in the villa rooms with long light coming in from the east. The ceremony on the terrace with the sea as the natural backdrop. The dinner that extended far into the evening, with speeches in Finnish and laughter that needed no translation.

For destination couples looking at villa weddings on the Costa del Sol, Nerja offers something that the larger resort towns cannot: a sense of arrival, of having found somewhere specific and unhurried. We cover weddings here regularly and we never tire of the light.