Finding the right pieces of land

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 image in which I combined the 4 plots of land and in blue the village.

The three plots where as expected the fourth was a bit more to the north close to the river which could make it an interesting different microclimate. But most importantly, we were missing a lot. We where told the contracts would come soon so we kept waited and hoping that more land would be added.

In September we got an email with 3 photos of a printed contract. Which made it a bit hard to read. The first was a list of the cadastral number of the houses. The second one was a first list of land with pieces around the village, different from the last time. And the third contained a list of land even more to the north. We were disappointed and quite soon agreed that we cannot go forward with the project with these pieces of land. We needed the land to be around the village for several reasons. First it is nice to be able to feel in control and having our own land next to our houses. Second, when tourists will come it would be nice to be already at the food forest instead of needing to walk to it. Thirdly, when having the land we would want to make sure that there would be no chemicals used on the land. But most importantly, for the village we will need clean water and for that we want to use the hills around the village. Pumping the water up and let the land clean it. 

Here is an image of the land proposal they were giving us (which looked quite different from the original proposal) .

Obviously we were not happy with this, it seemed Marcelino did not understand that we did not want any hectares. And somehow he decided without any question that this was fine too. So we made a spreadsheet with all the plots of land and assigned to each land a priority number (on a scale from 1 to 3). One for most important and three for nice to have. There was a short phone call made and Marcelino said all will be fine.

So again we were waiting. And indeed two weeks later we got a new proposal which seemed much better, as can be seen on the next image.

Only the left big piece of land was not in but that is the farthest away. For some reason the land owner did not want to sell it. Also in the upper part there are some smaller plots missing. Two are from the township and some others have unknown owners. But all in all we were really happy with the new offer.

There are some complications though and that is that plot nr 2 from the above image had a price tag that had become almost double the price per hectares compared to the others and there is one land owner who would only sell if his five ruïnes would also be sold. Which is nice but it adds in total about 40.000 euros. Which was pushing the total above our budget. 

 So we have one more bridge to cross. Hope to get good news in a next post!