Skip to main content

On to number two

Thrilled with our first empty village visit we went on to number two. It was about two hours drive and as we had some spare time we stopped at a small nearby village, Poza de la Sal. A small but nice middle aged village. With a tiny square with one bar and a tourist office. I went there and asked Maaike to join so we could ask about the place in Spanish. Luckily the nice guy spoke very well English. So we told him we wanted to build a food forest. He looked really happy and told us he was setti a festival Artim. Which was about regenerative farming and community building around new ways of growing food and taking care of the land.
Besides that he gave us about five phone numbers of Dutch people living in the area which were also living in empty villages and or working with land. 
After that amazing coincidence we drove on to village nr 2. 
 
An older man came by car and started to talk to me, I redirected him to Maaike as I could not speak Spanish, and she could. He said the price was 350.000 fixed, which we knew and was our spending limit. And that it was 76 ruïnes of which he owned 58. Which was much more than the 10 we expected. Nevertheless we were interested. 
He guided us around, he knew a lot about the place as he was already working on it for many years or even decades. He is an architect and had a plan to turn the place into a village with a restaurant, swimming pool, tennis court and parking places. He had a 15 million euro plan to do it. But as he was 76 he could not finish the project, hence the village was for sale.
 
After the tour we again said we were interested but only if it was possible to add about 10 ha of land to it. 
He left leaving us with our thoughts. We soon agreed that although this place was much more expensive this was more in line with our plan. Although we did not need this many ruïnes, the place was on the border of the dry land we wanted to improve and it had a little stream of water. The other villages was in a much greener area with no running water. 
We left dreaming and thinking about the questions we had. Is the streaming running whole year, is the mine which is next to the village a problem, what are we allowed to do with the possible land, will the Mayor be able to work with us and... many more questions. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The first week of work

After the transaction we had time to think about what we could do in the village, as now we are the owners. The next option for us to go to Spain was in the autumn holidays. Earlier on we tried to combine it with Spanish classes for the kids, but we couldn’t arrange extra free time from school, so we had to stick to the one week of school vacation. We thought about starting at one of the houses which is in the relative good condition, like getting a door, so we could close it and store stuff there. But we had no electricity or tools as we had no space to keep stuff safe. So we were kind of stuck in a chicken and egg problem. To get out of this we set up a plan to get a container which we could lock. But that would not be there for this vacation. Then Maaike’s parents asked: “Would it be of any use if we were there with some tools to clear away the burrs, bushes and so on?” Of course that would be great! We were happy that they were enthusiastic and by itself there was a plan to do ...
20 comments
Read more

Todo

We are looking forward to our next vacation in August. We have a substantial list of things we can do and are now busy preparing everything for it.  We have made a list of all the things we need to prepare based on this list of things we want to do: WC/shower hut - an outdoor space made of clay and stone as a toilet and shower Creating paths - many walking paths are difficult to traverse and need to be cleared Building a clay wall - to practice, we want to build a clay wall Building a stone wall - to practice, we want to build a stone wall Making stairs - there needs to be a staircase to get from the container to the romantic forest Planting trees - there are 120 Paulownia trees that need to be planted Connecting solar panels - we want to have 10 solar panels on the container and another 8 by our house Building a room - in the main house and our house, we can build a room Making an outdoor kitchen - along the container, an outdoor kitchen needs to be made Clearing stones ...
6 comments
Read more

Never alone in an abandoned village

One might expect that being in an abandoned village will be lonely. But a part from Carlos and all the people who we knew were going to visit us, everyday there were people visiting the village. let's start with the people we knew were going to visit us in order of appearance.   Mirthe, Rick and Vos who came visiting with their camper to find out if they want to live in Bárcena and to help us some days. They are now in the process of preparing to move to Bárcena so it seems that the answer is yes!     Maaike's Brother Teun, his wife Marieke and daughter Sarah , who were there for 2 weeks and took a lot of trips with the kids and cooked for us almost every day! But most important: they really liked being there, so hopefully they will come often when we live there.      As an ultra runner Teun explored the area by running and cycling. For example he explored routes to Lences and found three different ones. Tibor's daughter Fiona , who helped a lot with ...
3 comments
Read more