How to survive a group villa holiday with 12 kids, adults and friends

“Is this the best villa you look after?” I asked caretaker Bazz on the pool terrace overlooking Fuengirola. “Possibly,” he said, “I tell you something though – it’s the best nightclub.”

And with that, he unveiled party room two (party room one had an X-Box, Lazyboy-style chairs, 3-metre cinema screen and a Nintendo Wii).

“This is the Club Room,” he said – and it was hard to disagree. A bar with a beer tap, a pool table, sound system, disco lights, dance floor, and the crowning glory - a pole-dancing pole - Ministry of Sound eat your heart out.

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This was going to be our home for the next three days – four 30-something girls who’d left babies, fiancées and boyfriends behind for a long weekend of girlie excess.

To complete the package, we’d hired the flashiest car on the easycar.com website. While we may not have turned as many heads in our Renault Cabriolet as we’d hoped, we had a lot of giggles over the errant hairdos that emerged – note the Thelma and Louise headscarf look for next time…

We’d struggle to top the girlie excess that preceded us mind you – 14 school leavers whose wild week had culminated in a potted tree being thrown into the pool – but we vowed to put our Ian McEwan novels and Easy Living magazines down for some waywardness none-the-less.

The high rises of Fuengirola – where the most popular nightspot is the London Pub – held little allure.

This is the heart of the Costa del Sol, where chips grace the menus more than paella and British lobsters plaster the beaches. What it lacks in sophistication, though, it makes up for in endless summer sunshine and convenience – Malaga airport is served by some 14 British airlines and is only a half-hour drive from the villa.

And as it turns out, we didn’t need to stray further than the three floors of our party villa for revelry.

By day we lounged by the pool, sipped rose, and listened to the sunbathing playlist we’d created on the music system. By night the BPM’s went up a few notches, and after a barbeque, it was time to head to our private club for some terrible games of pool, even worse dancing and some pole-spinning that would have had us thrown out of Stringfellows.

The potted-tree-in-the-pool incident left its mark – we couldn’t take a dip for the first 24 hours while it was treated, but with an outdoor whirlpool, albeit a chilly one, there was somewhere to cool off between sunbathes.

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