
Ghost Villages for Sale in Spain - hourislate
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-29/ghost-villages-for-sale-as-spain-fights-rural-desertification
======
pavlov
_”The company recently got a boost after Gwyneth Paltrow flagged one of its
villages on her website as a good Christmas present.”_

I thought this was a joke, but clicking on the link reveals that a $172k
village in Spain was indeed listed in “gift ideas” alongside such more
traditional items as a $7700 Hermès surfboard.

As fitting a portrait of our present era’s wealth distribution as any. Future
generations may look back on us as a bunch of Marie Antoinettes tinkering with
our programming languages while the world burned.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Heck, just look at the thread on the cancellation of Apple's wireless charger.
Part of me wished I could post a gif of the daunting and terrifying task of
putting a phone in a docking station.

~~~
village-idiot
You say that in jest, but that is actually how this process works. Remember
when touchID came out and many people mockingly thanked Apple for not having
to enter 4-6 digits? Now how many people get pissed off when their wet thumb
doesn’t read right and they have to enter their pin?

People get used to new luxuries.

~~~
paganel
I’m wondering if I’m not the only person who’s not locking his smart-phone. At
the same time I’m also making sure to never leave it out of sight and I have
no Internet banking. I also have my WiFi network at home open, have had it for
more than 10 years now.

~~~
tinus_hn
That’s going to be fun when someone decides to use your connection to make a
bomb thread, or worse, upload copyrighted content.

~~~
paganel
We don’t have that many bomb-threats in the country I live in and fortunately
the big media companies haven’t yet got the local authorities by the balls
when it comes to copyright infringement. Agreed, had I lived in a country like
Germany I might have done differently.

------
rorykoehler
Am I the only one who sees depopulation of rural areas as a good thing? It's
an opportunity to rewild large parts of the continent. We don't need humans
dominating every last square metre of the globe. That's part of what is
causing most of our problems in the first place.

~~~
mmjaa
No, I completely disagree with you. Having travelled the world, I feel the
worst thing we can do is continue with the big cities. They need to be
dismantled, and replaced with smaller, lighter, more local communities that do
not require so much energy to maintain - very big city requires immense
resources to keep it running, every single day.

More rural living is what will save us, imho.

~~~
chx
Do you know what the most energy efficient people moving device is? The
counterweight elevator. It's true. Cramming a village worth of people into a
highrise, surrounding it with walking distance amenities is by far the most
efficient, environment friendly way of supplying said populace. Yes, you need
trucks to stock said stores but then again, no matter where they live you'd
still need those trucks and this way a) economies of scale apply b) they don't
go anywhere in single use cars. Instead of going rural, cities with mass
transit is the way to live if we are this many. Reducing the populace slowly
would be a strategy but it's not what the reality is.

~~~
mmjaa
Bollocks. It takes amazing amounts of oil to get the cheap stuff to the
cities. The only reason these are more 'efficient' is because of arbitrary
pricing - if we placed a higher value on oil-consumption, in terms of cost to
the Earth, the cheap plastic junk wouldn't be being subsidised by our
childrens future.

I know its not a popular opinion, but the things that take so much oil to make
and transport and deliver to the people, are there so that city people can
live another day without pitching into the abyss.

Rural living is better for the Earth. If I can walk to my neighbour and get
butter, instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from
a source originally half a country away, please explain to me how this is
'more energy efficient'. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless one is simply so
enamoured by the luxuries of city life that one can't see the forest for the
trees.

Cities are expensive to build, maintain, and they are destroying our future.
Abandon!

~~~
chx
Your problem is going to be that you not only need butter but also need a
myriad other things and only a few of those can be self sufficient in a small
local community. Yes, we shouldn't truck things from half a country away but
that doesn't mean the energy consumption / CO2 footprint at the end of the day
will be lower for a sprawl than a dense city.

Yes, cutting back to medieval times, wearing homespun, most amenties supplied
by the local blacksmith and cobbler and some things supplied by traveling
merchants , that'd obviously be more environmentally friendly. I doubt most
people are ready to do that. And also -- Malthus would like to have a word
with you. No way you can supply this many people with such technology.

Yes, the ultimate green solution is to decrease the amount of people living on
Earth but check how China did with the one child policy.

~~~
Nasrudith
The funny thing is that it isn't more friendly because efficiency produces big
gains - look at just how much more land is required for organic farming vs
conventional practices - let alone lower tech subsistence farming which
amounts to 'slash and burn and then move on when the soil has depleted', heck
even cooking fires produce far worse air pollution than propane stoves.

Local and small scale may 'feel cozy' but they aren't efficient - they were
abandoned for a reason.

------
kgwgk
I think people overestimates how "remote" those "ghost villages" are. They are
very small settlements (the article mentions six houses) which may be a few
hundred meters from the next inhabited place. It's likely that there are at
least ten thousand people living in a 10 miles radius. (I'm refering to the
regions that the article talks about, population is much more sparse in other
regions in Spain.)

~~~
iagovar
That's a bit of a strech. You can definitely be 50km away of everything in
Galicia, and probably way more in Castilla. It's true that population is more
dispersed in the northwest though.

~~~
kgwgk
I don't say that there are thousands of people around any random point, I
meant that I would be really surprised if any of the places being talked about
in the article is really isolated.

It also depends on your definition of being "50km away from everything". What
place are you thinking of?

------
hatchnyc
Reading this just made me think, imagine someday, perhaps a few hundred years,
if the world's population were to rise even higher briefly and then
dramatically fall simply due to falling birthrates. The ruins of a worldwide
infrastructure of abandoned towns and cities built for 10 or 20 times the
current population would probably seem very eerie.

~~~
volkl48
Recent book came out arguing fairly persuasively that we're basically there
and you're going to see unprecedented depopulation in many areas by the end of
the century. Title is _Empty Planet_ \- the shock of global population
decline.

Places like China are potentially going to shrink by hundreds of millions of
people this century.

------
rdl
I'm sure there are plenty of people who can work remotely who would love to
live in a place like this, if it were either turnkey or at least if there were
some collective action organization. Makes even more sense in Portugal, though
-- you could live in a place for 182 days/yr, after putting 350k euros
investment into it, with a grant of portugese citizenship. I'm sure there are
similar villages/properties in rural areas too.

~~~
reidrac
It may be tricky to do remote work from one of these places. In Spain, rural
areas may not have broadband at all. You may have phone line, but the quality
is so bad that not even ASDL is usable.

~~~
ez7r6i
Rural areas of Spain usually have decent 4G service.

Good luck getting hired for remote work in Spain, though.

Edit for the guys below: obviously I meant working for a Spanish company.

~~~
misterhtmlcss
Why do you say that? Remote is remote, is I'm hiring remote, why would I care
if the person is in Spain, Portugal or anywhere else? I'm sure you have
context behind your comment and it would be great if you shared it.

~~~
GordonS
At least for US companies, I do see a lot of remote positions that specify
that candidates must be US based. Not sure why...

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
Timezone alignment. General cultural missunderstandings. People got burned by
outsourcing, the original remote work.

------
pxndx
I've been thinking that if I suddenly had a large sum of money, I'd buy one of
these villages, renovate it, add amenities and proper internet, and then rent
the individual homes to people that work remote, or set it up as a kind of co-
living and co-working space, like a company town.

~~~
AdrianB1
And nobody will come if the closest hospital is a 2 hour drive and the closest
store is far enough that whatever you buy costs double when you factor in the
transportation. And you can believe it is a great place to raise kids if you
want them to be loners, 'cause there is no school or other kid on a 50
kilometer radius. A great place to live for a monk, not regular people.

~~~
pxndx
A store is one of the "amenities" I'd provide. But you're right about the
hospital and education part. I'd probably have a daycare, but anything higher
gets harder to do. In any case, it'd be a temporary thing for digital nomads

------
pseudolus
There's a similar ongoing phenomenon in Italy as well, with villages selling
homes for ridiculously low prices [0].

[0] [https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-villages-selling-
dol...](https://www.businessinsider.com/italian-villages-selling-dollar-
homes-2019-2)

~~~
trickstra
> Villages across Italy are selling abandoned properties for 1 euro or less,
> provided that owners take care of the renovations.

These renovations are typically more expensive than tearing down the house and
building a new one, but that is forbidden, because there is probably some kind
of regulation and "historical value". So saying that these are low prices is
super misleading

~~~
davidw
My wife (who is from Italy) looked into the total costs in one place
(somewhere in Sardinia), and renovations and all, it's still not _that_
expensive.

------
heliodor
General opinion seems to be that this is a bad thing but I disagree.

Modern life offers us much more than we'd get by being farmers. We also need
fewer farmers because of automation and large-scale farming.

People want to move to urban areas. Let them, and don't judge.

~~~
mojuba
Was my first thought too, but villages not growing into towns is also an
indication of a different problem: it's a demographic disaster of declining
birth rates.

~~~
saalweachter
Or consolidation of a population via internal migration into a smaller number
of larger towns.

------
oblio
If you want a village plus broadband, buy one in Romania. Still in the EU,
less developed (but for this scenario, who cares?).

Heck, it's probably going to be cheaper!

~~~
Mediterraneo10
I agree. As someone from Romania who works remotely, I moved from the big city
to a village about 50 km away, seeking a quieter life. Even there fiber had
been run out. It only took a few days for the ISP to show up and run some
fiber from the pole to my home, and then I was enjoying speeds as fast as I
had previously had in the heart of the city.

Romanians are lucky that this country saw an early broadband boom in the 1990s
and early millennium, and fiber was run out everywhere. Sadly, the
neighbouring countries tend to emphasize mobile internet for getting villages
connected instead of physical links, but that means that in villages there you
cannot, for example, torrent Bluray images to your heart’s content.

~~~
AdrianB1
Your situation is still rare in Romania. Also consider how far are you from
the closest hospital (if you are far from Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi or Timisoara
you are too far), a decent school for your kids, a decent place to go out (not
the village pub where alcoholics waste their lives) and so on. One can live
like a monk, but not raise a family in a small village or even a city like
Petrosani (very nice area, but zero amenities), Pucioasa, Pascani or Pecica.
There are not so many jobs where you can work from home, especially exclusive
from home. I also work from home most of the time, but when I need to get to
the office I spend 3-4 hours driving: not nice.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> a decent place to go out (not the village pub where alcoholics waste their
> lives)

If you are in your early 20s and going out every night, then a village might
suck. But I’m older now, and for the one or two times a week I meet friends, I
just cycle down to the train station, put my bike on the train, and in an hour
or so I’m in the city.

Even when I just want a coffee for myself, there is a small town nearby with
two nice cafes. It’s not all alcoholics outside the big city.

> a decent school for your kids ... but not raise a family in a small village

Are you religious or something? The vast majority of my social circle either
does not want children, or wants 1 child much later in life. So, no reason
that such people who prefer a quiet life cannot spend at least a few years in
the countryside now.

> There are not so many jobs where you can work from home, especially
> exclusive from home.

Romania might be the remote-working capital of Europe now. Coworking spaces
are popping up like mushrooms after rain. Yes, not everyone can work remotely,
but anyone who has a university education and who uses English a lot ought to
at least consider becoming a freelancer, or applying at a Western European
company that will let them work from home in RO.

~~~
ido

        Are you religious or something? The vast majority of 
        my social circle either does not want children, or 
        wants 1 child much later in life. So, no reason that 
        such people who prefer a quiet life cannot spend at 
        least a few years in the countryside now.
    

You may be surprised to find a lot of people on HN are already “much later in
life”. Also, from the experience of several friends of mine who had a lot
trouble- if you want kids you should start trying before the future mother is
40.

We were lucky to be very fertile/healthy but we also started having kids in
our early 30s.

------
deanalevitt
The big question is land ownership. Does the buyer get to own the land? Or is
it more like a 100-year lease from the state?

$100k for large swathes of land anywhere in Europe sounds like a steal to me.

~~~
lumberjack
"Ownership" is meaningless. Each region of Europe have their own laws
regarding what you can and cannot do with the land you "own" and what duties
and rights you get by owning it. For example, you might buy one of these
houses but the building codes mandate that you renovate and preserve the
exterior. Heck, in some countries you are not allowed to even live in
structures outside the habitable region.

~~~
deanalevitt
Right, that's why I brought it up. In Italy, they were selling houses for $1
but the regulations around it plus the ongoing property taxes change the
entire calculus.

Regardless, land is valuable but only if you own it and have some control over
monetizing your ownership.

------
Razengan
In all these comments re: rural versus urban versus megacities, nobody seems
to have brought up arcologies (as per the sci-fi'ish concept, not half-baked
experimental villages like Arcosanti):

A city contained within a single megastructure, or a small cluster of
megastructures, with large areas of natural/semi-natural, green, forested
lands around them.

Manufacturing and energy generation for all the needs of their residents would
be done inside the megastructure or adjacent to it.

Let's see:

• People love living spaces that they have complete control over.

• People love being near other people, without being forced to _always_ be
near other people.

• People hate feeling crowded, without any convenient escape to solitude.

• People hate long commutes.

• Unbroken stretches of concrete jungles are dystopian and depressing as hell,
no matter how "modern" or glamorous they may be (see places like Dubai.)

• People love greenery, occasional communes with nature, the babbling of
brooks and seeing other lifeforms flourish without impinging on human
habitats.

• If given a choice without giving up convenience, people want to avoid
pollution.

Cities compressed into a few ecological + ergonomic + economic megastructures
would tick a lot of those boxes.

The tech may not be there yet, but I hope to see a functional arcology in my
lifetime.

~~~
Zanni
If you drop the self-sufficiency requirement, then cruise-ships--which are now
the size of small cities--fit the bill.

~~~
Razengan
Without self-sufficiency it won't fix the problem that they will still be
exacting a toll (in pollution, destruction of habitat for other species) on
places that they don't physically occupy.

Completely self-sufficient megastructures may still pollute their immediate
surroundings, but that may be easier to contain and manage.

------
MordodeMaru
It's a pity Spain country side is becoming a vacuum.

~~~
y4mi
It's not unique to Spain though... And neither surprising, tbh.

Who in their right mind would even want to live without stable electricity,
good waste management and all the other things you take for granted in even
small villages (<1k)?

There is literally nothing there besides some houses. That's enough to take a
break on some holiday... But very few people would be willing to suffer
through that long term

~~~
ben_w
My siblings were interested in buying an old place in the Spanish countryside
as a BTL holiday home, but heard some worrying things about the Spanish legal
attitude to inheritance that put them off second hand places. (I won’t repeat
what they said; they are neither lawyers nor speakers of Spanish so I give
their fears no more than 50% credence).

~~~
jxub
An "interesting" fact of Spain is that all unwritten inheritance goes to the
state, and this includes foreigners. Therefore, makes sense to lay down 200
bucks or so in lawyer fee and write the inheritance asap.

~~~
squeezingswirls
No, that's not true at all. Please read the Spanish Civil Code, starting at
Chapter 3 ("De la sucesión intestada") to see what's the order of heir
prevalence in case of "unwritten inheritance".

Only in the case that there isn't any relative, or widow, or widower, the
State will get a 'abintestato' inheritance.

~~~
jxub
Thanks for correcting me and sorry!

------
bawana
Are these villages truly for sale? Or do you have to pay a ton of taxes, fees,
(or as in Vancouver, BC - a foreign investment tax),etc? If they could be made
into tax free municipalities-then great.

------
akudha
This would be a good opportunity for a bunch of people to collectively buy a
handful of villages and turn them into creative spaces!

~~~
markdown
[http://tribewanted.com](http://tribewanted.com)

------
JoeAltmaier
No REC in Spain - so no electricity, no water, no communications. Maybe build
your own solar or something?

------
veryworried
Yes, how dare somebody buy something expensive with their own money!

~~~
dang
Could you please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and stick to the rules when posting here?

They include: " _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics unless you
have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
tangents._"

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529100)
and marked it off-topic.

------
LifeLiverTransp
Another sign that industrialized civilisation consumes its inhabitants. All to
the citys, to sit in tiny cubicles and apartments, waiting lonely for ones
demise. What a triumph, what a archivment.

~~~
Pfhreak
> waiting lonely for ones demise

I mean... there's a whole lot of assumptions there...

