village for sale: €650K

Uninhabited village, 25 houses with 80 hectares next to the Ordesa and Monte Perdido national park in the Aragonese Pyrenees for only €650K:

I’ve only been to this one once and can’t comment further, but sales of deserted hamlets of this nature are going to become more frequent, even in Catalonia, as the Ryanair effect kicks in and Birmingham sells in the Welsh borders in order to buy in the sun.

If you purchase a village, the biggest initial problem is going to be stuff like putting in roads and basic services without getting slaughtered by the contractors and the bureaucracy. That done, your major medium- to long-term risk is legal. Most of the people who lived in these places assumed that their houses were worth nothing when they went off to work in the cities during the 50s and 60s - and many of them couldn’t write - so establishing ownership of a complete village can be extremely difficult. One bunch of foreign investors bought a settlement in the region a few years back in order to set up a hippy theme-park new-age community, only to find that a deranged hooligan from Madrid still owned a patch next to the chapel and had decided that it would do his soul good to come up and lie around every other weekend drinking beer and shooting rabbits. Beware…

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