Those who dream of living in the countryside may find announcing a real estate company in Spain a unique opportunity that allows owning an entire village for $259,000.
The village of Salto de Castro is located in northwest Spain, on the border with Portugal, in the province of Zamora, and a 3-hour drive from the capital, Madrid.
The village, according to the BBC, includes 44 homes, a hotel, a church, a school, a swimming pool, and a group of barracks that were used to house the Spanish Civil Guard.
No one has lived in the village for sale, for more than 3 decades.
The owner of the village had bought it at the beginning of the first decade of this century with the aim of turning it into a tourist area, but the economic crises experienced by the Eurozone prevented the success of his scheme.
"His dream was to build a hotel here, but the project froze, and yet he still hopes to achieve it," said Ronnie Rodrives of Royal Invest, which represents the owner.
"I decided to sell because I live in the city, and I can't live in the village," the owner, who is in his 80s, says on the Idelista real estate website.
The show has attracted the attention of 50,000 visitors since the village was offered for sale at this price last week, and 300 people expressed their desire to buy.
It is worth noting that the village was built by the electricity generation company Iberduero to house the families of the workers who built the water reservoir in the area near Salto de Castro, since the early fifties, but the residents left it after its completion, and it was completely abandoned in the late eighties.
The area around the village is called "empty Spain", a sparsely populated rural area that lacks many of the services found in large towns and cities.
The village was previously offered for sale for 6.5 million euros, but the lack of buyers' interest and the damage to some buildings made the price drop to close to that equivalent to the price of buying a one-bedroom apartment in the prestigious areas of Madrid or Barcelona.