Inside abandoned village with pool, bar & gym that gets 135 days of sun a year…& could be yours for the price of a house
AN entire abandoned village with 44 homes is up for sale – and it could be yours for the same price as just one house.
Salto de Castro, in north-western Spain, gets 135 days of sun each year and boasts its own hotel, pool and bar.
No one has lived in Salto de Castro for three decades, but now it could all be yours.
The almost-forgotten village in the Zamora province is on the market for twice the price it sold for last year.
The entire lot is up for grabs for £500,000 – the same price as many houses in the UK.
Prospective buyers would be snapping up dozens of homes, a hotel, a church, a school, a gym, sports areas and a pool and even a barracks building that used to house the civil guard.
The village – located a stone’s throw from the border with Portugal – boasts picturesque views of the Douro River.
And the region gets an average of 1,620 hours of sun each year, which works out as 135 days that you could be basking in the Spanish sun.
It was built during the 1940s to house workers and their families who were building the nearby dam.
The abandonment of the 400sqm village began in the 1980s and by 1989, the plant had shut down and there were no inhabitants left.
The region around the village has become known as “emptied Spain” due to the sparsely populated towns with few services.
The entity that buys Salto de Castro will reportedly be eligible for subsidies from the regional government.
It was snapped up last year for £259,000 by construction magnate Óscar Torres Gallego – and now has hit the market again for almost double.
Torres had developed a plan to renovate the village – located in the heart of the Meseta Ibérica UNESCO Biosphere Reserve – in a bid to attract rural tourism to the area.
After submitting the paperwork to authorities, he then decided to put up for sale due to “personal problems”.
And there are already interested parties.
Torres’ estate agent, Romuald Rodríguez from Royal Invest, said: “So far, we have received offers from Saudi Arabia and the United States.”
Regarding the steep price hike, Rodríguez said they had previously received offers of more than half a million euros, so the increase is “more than logical”.
The owners before Torres had bought the village in the early 2000s with the dream of transforming it into a tourist hotspot.
Their grand plans failed to come to fruition – but they still hoped such a project would go ahead.
Salto de Castro was previously put up for sale for £1.4million in 2017.
And then the owner asked for an eye-watering £5.6million in 2019.
Unsurprisingly, no buyers stepped forward at the time.
Many of the buildings have been vandalised over the years – causing the value of the land to plummet.
Although the price tag is low, the eventual buyer of the village would need to front a lot of cash to turn it into the tourist destination its previous owners had hoped for.
According to Idealista: “The investment required in order to make the village 100% workable and to become profitable would not exceed €2million [£1.7million].”