With Gwyneth Paltrow we have learned to expect the unexpected, so it is not surprising that the woman who gave us jade vagina eggs and coffee suppositories should produce an eccentric Christmas gift catalogue on her website, Goop.
Knowingly titled The Ridiculous But Awesome Gift Guide, suggested gifts include a Hermès surfboard, a banana lamp, an Aston Martin and, for the environmentally conscious billionaire, a zero-emissions yacht. Oh, and an entire Spanish village.
Yes, for $172,910 (£134,837) you can buy an abandoned village near Lugo in Galicia in north-west Spain. One 360 sq metre house has a new roof and has mains water and electricity. According to the estate agent, Aldeas Abandonadas (Abandoned Villages), it doesn’t require much work. There is also a 22 sq metre bread oven, a cellar, a hay barn and an hórreo – a typical Galician stone building used for drying maize.
“She appears to have chosen it at random,” says Elvira Fafián, who runs the estate agency. “Prices range from €85,000 (£75,543) to several million. For the price of a space in a parking building in Madrid or Barcelona, you can buy a village and leave the stress of city life behind.”
This would reverse the trend of the past 70 years, during which poverty has driven Spaniards to abandon rural life for the city or emigration. According to official figures, there are 1,949 abandoned villages in Galicia alone.
But Fafián says demand is increasing, with about 60% of buyers from abroad and 40% Spanish. Swedes and Dutch are among those who have already shown an interest in the village in Paltrow’s catalogue.
“People are interested in rural life and here the countryside is fantastic, there are rivers to fish in, it’s very green here,” she says. The agency has nearly 100 villages for sale on its books.
Fafián says they get a lot of Swiss and retired people, as well as locals who can now afford to buy. “Most of the interest from America is from people who emigrated in the 1960s and want to return to their roots and reclaim what their parents had to leave behind,” she says, adding that local people are delighted to see these villages coming back to life.
“This may be the future for Galicia, since it has the largest number of settlements in Spain being abandoned for life in the cities,” says Gabino Carballo, a native of Lugo. “It also has a tricky demographic combination, with lots of retired people, a low birth rate and very low immigration.
“Since Galicians seem to be riding into extinction, the future may well rest in the hands of wealthy foreigners wishing to live life as it may have been in medieval times. A time Galicia has never really left behind, if I am honest with you.”
