ardbol

With Bárcena de Bureba we have found something unfindable. Which sounds impossible but it is true.  Bárcena cannot be found on google maps. When searching on Google you will find a place in Spain but somewhere in the middle of nowhere. See the image on the right. And we all know if Google cannot find it, it does not exist! As you can see this is not a village and not even an empty village but just some meadow. In the left panel Google recognizes the village as a ghost town with images which actually are from the actual village. Here you see one of the broken houses with graffiti on it. This is from the real Bárcena and not the above location in the meadows.    All the way at the bottom you find the Ghost town label. In the search bar google gives it a zip code of 09410. A funny detail is that there are 6 reviews and they seem to be very happy with the empty town as it has an average of 4.3 stars. But if you want to visit, do not drive to this location as you will not ...

When we first visited Bárcena de Bureba we where guided by the current owner Marcelino. As we where interested, we told him about our project Ardbol. We explained him that we needed about 5 to 10 hectares of land. He replied that it was no problem, he knew many farmers in the area. Soon we got an image of the land area (See image below) from Marcelino without any explanation but it looked promising.  We assumed the black crosses where the pieces of land we could buy. When I checked it on the Spanish cadastral website some pieces where quite clear but some existed out of many small parts.  After the price negotiation we where anxiously waiting on which pieces of land we could buy. In august we got a large zipfile with new information. As Yasmin could not open it and we where on mobiles we needed to wait until we where behind a computer, which of course added on to the tension. Finally we could open it. In it where 64 files. 60 of each house and 4 for the land. See the next imag...

  As we were interested in the abandoned village we needed to see if we could afford it. On the website it was stated it was € 350.000 for options 1. Option 1 being 20 houses with an extra optional land. That immediately was our full budget. So we were hoping the price could include the land. It was also much higher than our other option which was € 50.000 for 10 ruïnes. When we got our tour the first thing Marcelino said was that the price was € 350.000 so it did not sound that there was much room to negotiate but we tried nevertheless. First step was to add the optional land. As we were planning to create a food forest, for us that was the most important.  During the tour he said it would not be a problem and within some weeks he had sent us the image below without any explanation. Our guess was that the black crosses where the parts we could buy. So that seemed perfect.  I checked the 'cadastral' website and it seemed that the land would be about 6 hectares. It was re...