For those who dream of moving to the countryside, how about buying an entire villa in Spain?
The village of Salto de Castro, in northwest Spain, is up for sale for €260,000. Located in the Province of Zamora, on the border with Portugal, the village is a three-hour drive from Madrid.
Salto de Castro has many of the typical buildings of a small Spanish town. There are 44 houses, a hotel, a church, a school, a municipal swimming pool and even a barracks that housed the civil guard.
But what the village lacks are residents. Salto de Castro has been abandoned for more than three decades.
The owner bought the village in the early 2000s, with the intention of turning it into a tourist spot. However, the eurozone economic crisis prevented the plan from succeeding.
“The owner had a dream of having a hotel here, but everything was postponed,” said Ronnie Rodríguez, a broker at Royal Invest, the company that represents the villa’s owner. “He would still like the project to come true.”
The owner, who is in his 80s, justified the sale on the Idealista website, where the ad was placed: “I’m selling because I’m urban and I can’t afford the maintenance of the village,” he said.
The site has attracted great interest in recent days, with more than 50,000 visits to the site since it went on sale a week ago.
Rodriguez said 300 people have expressed interest in buying, with orders coming in from Russia, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. A potential buyer has already invested money to make a reservation, the broker said.
Salto de Castro was built in the 1950s by the electric power generation company Iberduero.
The objective was to shelter the families of the workers who built a reservoir in the region. But the residents moved after the work was completed and the village was completely abandoned in the late 1980s.
The region is part of what has become known as “emptied Spain”—sparsely populated rural areas that lack many of the services found in towns and cities.
Salto de Castro was previously put up for sale for €6.5 million. However, without interested buyers and with many of the buildings vandalized, the price of the villa plummeted.
The asking price of €260,000 is just enough for a one-bedroom apartment in affluent areas of Madrid or Barcelona.
But the eventual buyer of Salto de Castro may need a lot more money, at least to attract visitors.
According to the real estate website Idealista, “the investment needed to make the village 100% viable and profitable would not exceed €2 million”.
– This text was published here.
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