Lots of Tourists, Please, and a Couple of Foreign Settlers Should Do It

While the Spanish authorities like to promote this fine country as a tourist destination (Fitur, the international tourist fair, is held later this month on 23rd – 27th January), there has never been much interest in promoting housing for foreigners ‘el turismo residencial as it is oddly called). You are welcome to come for a week’s holidays, but the Spaniards aren’t particularly concerned with those who might be buying a house here (and spending, annually, at least 100 times more than a tourist does). They may suppose that foreign residents don’t buy souvenirs and don’t sleep in ‘all-inclusive’ hotels.

And if the foreign buyers still bring in too much money, well, we can always knock down their house (Len and Helen Prior: 11 years ago, Wednesday), or cut their water and electric. The AUAN, a foreign-run organisation, appears to be the only hope for those victims.

The press is pretty much silent on the lost opportunity as well, perhaps as los guiris don’t buy many newspapers (or, as we have seen, vote), or maybe because the media simply doesn’t understand the economics involved.

Indeed, only two peripheral stories tend to work their way into print.

The first is the ‘lamentación’ of the dying pueblos (video) of the interior – small villages with their young-folk moving away to the attractions of the big city. Moribund pueblos that have only a few hundred old folk left, with no bank, no doctor, no pharmacy and probably just a few to serve them in the local municipality. How can we reverse this trend, they editorialise. With more births (hah!), cheap rentals, or maybe some refugees to build things up? But, be careful not to occupy one improperly, as happened in Fraguas, Guadalajara, where the small group of hippies ended up with a sentence of 18 months for their troubles.

The other subject that’s always good for a few column inches is the story of the deserted hamlet for sale. Why, there’s even an agency that specialises in the business. We hear that Gwyneth Paltrow seems to have inspired more than a few journalists with her Christmas wish aldea abandonada in Galicia (indeed, apparently a Dutch couple are buying it).

There are, we read, any number of these hamlets on the market, including one in Almería, but who exactly wants to buy one? A wealthy person might buy a crumbling palacio, or a large house, and repair it, but a village? What on earth for? Rural tourism maybe?

Regardless of this, El País in English ran an article earlier this month titled ‘Thinking of buying a deserted village in Spain? Hurry, prices are going up. Spaniards are now entering a market that has been traditionally dominated by Belgian, British and French buyers’.