Malaga airport’s €1.5 billion expansion to begin in 2029 – boosting capacity to 36 million passengers a year

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Key takeaways

Malaga airport plans a €1.5 billion expansion starting in 2029 to handle 36 million annual passengers.
The seven-year project will double security filters and significantly expand passport controls.
Funding includes €852 million allocated from Aena's upcoming five-year investment plan.

MALAGA airport authorities have outlined a massive €1.5 billion expansion to ease the strain on systems and comfortably handle 36 million passengers a year.

The works are expected to begin in 2029 and will last for approximately seven years. Sergio Millanes Vaquero, the newly appointed director of the transport hub, said the sweeping project will double the number of security filters and ‘multiply passport controls by six’.

Project scope and planning

He explained the enormous investment will overhaul every aspect of the site, telling reporters it ‘touches all flows of the airport’. The expansion is currently in the drafting phase, with bidding and contract awards expected to take two to three years.

Funding for the mega-project will be split across different periods, with €852 million coming from the 2027 five-year investment plan of Aena, Spain’s state-owned airport operator. Of that initial tranche, around €570 million will be dedicated purely to airport operations, while the remaining balance of the €1.5 billion total will fall into the subsequent five-year budget.

Addressing system pressures

The overarching goal is to prepare the Costa del Sol gateway to comfortably absorb 36 million passengers annually without delays. While Millanes Vaquero insisted the airport could technically handle that figure today, he admitted the infrastructure is feeling the pressure.

“We are not without capacity, but the systems suffer more as they are close to the theoretical limits,” he said.

Upgrades and optimization

Upgrades will specifically target bottlenecks in the boarding areas and introduce modern technology at security checkpoints. Rather than measuring total annual volume, Aena calculates capacity by adding up the hourly limits of individual subsystems, such as passport control, which currently stands at 9,800 passengers per hour.

During the peak summer months, the airport recorded days with more than 100,000 passengers, hitting a record high of 107,000. Millanes Vaquero noted that multiplying that peak daily figure across a full year would equal around 39 million passengers.

He stressed that while overall capacity will grow, this does not necessarily mean adding more square metres of floor space, but rather optimising how the terminal is used. A study is currently underway to determine exactly how much physical space each subsystem needs before calculating the final annual capacity.

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