Nightmare for residents trapped in Spanish ghost towns
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 @ 12:38 PM
Sightseers come to Spain for the Alhambra, the Gaudis, the beaches. But Spaniards talk about a new set of landmarks, a kind of tourist anti-attraction. You can find them clustered on the outskirts of big cities and around holiday resorts, in Madrid and Valencia. They are half-completed housing estates, often vast areas of empty flats and foundations and property-developers' hubris. Now they are nearly deserted. The Spanish call them ciudades fantasma: ghost towns.
Anyone who wants to understand the challenges facing Spain – and by implication the rest of the eurozone – should visit one. Take the route I did, to a place called Valdeluz in Guadalajara. It's easy enough: board the fancy high-speed train from central Madrid to Barcelona and get off half an hour later. If my experience is anything to go by, only a handful of passengers will spill out on to what is a nearly new station. And there, beyond the bored security guards and the metal railings is … nothing. Another platform for cheap commuter trains, completed but never used, and then acres of red dust and weeds.
Valdeluz was meant to be a dormitory town, with 9,500 houses for nearly 30,000 residents. But the lead developer hit the rocks a couple of years ago, with only around 1,500 units completed and 700 people moved in.
Joaquín Ormazábal is one of those Valdeluz residents. Forty-four years old and separated from his partner, he bought a three-bed flat in the development four years ago for €240,000 (£211,000). Four years later, it's now worth less than €140,000.
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