I saw lots of similar locations through my young years in Spain. Ultimately, it's just a somewhat damaged weather containment in the form of a pile of stones and mortar, with no other utility advantages than a dirt road, maybe a nearby river and some flat lots for home farming.
The only real advantage over any other random off the grid country side location is that building permits are a lot easier on existing constructions, even if they are crumbling and they have to be completely rebuilt.
I live in Galicia (Spain), near some of these villages. I've been to some of them personally and they are beautiful. Creating a tech community in one of them has crossed my mind several times.
Positive:
- Calm and beautiful places, surrounded by hills, forests, rivers... a good place to think and to develop new ideas.
- Affordable houses and terrains.
- Galician goverment gives money and help if you want to move in.
- Airports nearby, London is 3-4 hours away by plane.
Negative:
- Most of these buildings are in ruins.
- Poor infrastructure or none at all: you'll miss water, electricity and phone lines. No mobile communications, for sure. Phone companies don't help much either.
- Roads that lead there are often difficult and dangerous.
- No other villages or cities are close, so no hospitals, supermarkets or other services nearby.
The weather is rainy. Think of London or Ireland, something like that, but less cold. Insects are not a problem here, in northern Spain.
How far the beach is... it depends on the roads, maybe 2h on average but it can take much longer (5h maybe?). I live in Santiago de Compostela, there is a beach about 30 mins away.
There are hills almost everywhere, but not many mountains.
Galicia is a beautiful place and you'll have very pretty beaches but realize that you'll enjoy the coldest sea water in Spain in summer and the sea in winter is really wild.
It is very rainy and you can feel isolated and depressive, specially in winter and fall. Climate is better that in London or Berlin for sure; rural internet... well this a different question.
Some old people can be also very troublesome. Fire forests from cattle owners are a real treat (100 declared forest fires between the last saturday and monday only in Galicia).
You can have also problems with Hunters and poachers. It is forbidden for example to shoot towards a path or road or < 500m of a house, but a lot of hunters simply ignore the law all the time. People has been shooted whereas doing footing or over a bike, other have collected lost projectils falling in their garden or crashing against the windows, and three or four people are killed mistakenly by hunters each year. Is not common but can occur. If is hunting day better escape to the city or keep at the house.
Poison can be another big problem locally (dog owners be very afraid) so if you end with the wrong neighbour this can be a hell.
But this can be a heaven also. Food is fan-tas-tic, varied and cheap (specially if you do not have cultural problems with sea food). Galizian language can be confusing for non natives but is not a problem. Most people are really sweet by nature and will be glad to talk you in spanish anytime (please take in mind that this is not always guaranteed in isolated villages of the radicalized Catalunya or in the Basque Country at this moment).
Mosquitos are not a big problem normally, neither cockroaches. Wild boars and roe deers will be a problem for your garden and fruit trees (but the first is soo delicious and unavoidable, and the second is so preetty and easy to fix...). Badgers, Wolves and brown bears either avoid people at all cost unless harassed, or just ignore you and keep themselves at a safe distance. Is very uncommon (but supercool) to see them. The first is very common, the other two very rare.
I always joke with the idea of starting a new town with select people. Whether it is tech people, or just smart folks in general, I think it would be a fun experiment. What types of issues might come up with such a commune? I expect most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town, until they can be automated.
An alternative idea is to buy one of the many abandoned malls in the US and turn that into housing, common space, and shops. Is anyone doing this?
> expect most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town
If we're honest with ourselves, isn't this roughly what much of the U.S. has going on now? "New towns" are started as suburbs with economical segregation. Complete with gated communities. Or gentrifying urban areas. Low level work is performed by those from poorer, neighboring communities.
And the cycle of gentrification has shown us that it's the low-income high-creativity people that raise the standard of living in a neighbourhood. Once all the students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time are driven out by the doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids, the previously hip community sinks back into boredom.
And in practise, most of the "students, musicians and architects-working-at-cafe-and-having-too-much-free-time"
will turn into the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids", so it's really the ageing process that drives this process. Later the "doctors & architects-with-jobs-and-kids" will turn into pensioners, and when they move on to the next world, the cycle restarts. So it's not some kind of nefarious scheme that 'drives out' the allegedly more creative people, but rather communities evolve around ageing and family creating.
Gentrification is often driven by young, gay men and "creatives" - communities who cluster together and want affordable houses. Once the neighborhoods is "cleaned up" and full of hip businesses, the chains come in and the neighborhood turns "family friendly". Finally it reaches that "doctors and architects" state and it's too expensive for the vast majority.
> most low level work would have to be contracted out to people outside the town
Well, you could always select interesting, smart people who enjoy what you call "low level work" and mix them with interesting, smart people who do not perceive such work as low level/low prestige even if they do something more "high level" for a living.
Now that would be an interesting, smart community.
Ca La Fou is an ambitious ‘eco-industrial postcapitalist colony’, a day’s cycle outside barcelona. The group first visited this site in october 2010, and only moved here in july 2011. The enormous space was bought as a housing cooperative by the group with a loan from an ecological bank and support from a wider network.
The thirty permanent collective members work at a slow pace but have achieved a great deal by making the space livible and have already built a number of functioning workshops. These include:
- An impressive hacklab where broken computers are recycled into new ones
- A collaborative car workshop where engines are fixed to run with vegetable oil
- A Ukelele workshop
- A chemistry lab where soap is made from recycled vegetable oil mixed with caustic soda, (and sometimes recycled animal fat)
This would be my dream housing arrangement — a permanent little village in some beautiful country filled with self-directed and creative people.
When I was visiting Europe this past year, I saw plenty of gorgeous little hillside villages (pop. ~100) that relied on a larger town below. Some were within sight of major cities, while some were more remote. Even stayed in one for a few days, hiking down and back up whenever I needed groceries. It was really interesting and quite relaxing.
My main issue is that it feels like a rather, um, "colonialist" idea. It would be very important to integrate with the local community and culture.
I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already!
Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by.
Maybe better to own one of these smaller villages and have friends and colleagues drop in and out as they wished.
There'd be reasons the locals have abandoned them. Poor services, poor land, poor connectivity, etc. Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't. These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
> I think you'd then end up interacting with all those people and finding the majority of them to be just as annoying as everyone who currently frustrates you where you live already!
Perhaps, except I don't meet many people who'd be willing to permanently relocate to some remote village in my everyday life. (As opposed to the travel-back-and-forth-to-a-swanky-coworking-space-in-Thailand type people. Nothing wrong with that, but different breed, I think.) There's a higher chance I'd get along with them than with most people around me.
> Too idealistic to plan just for creatives when so many in that category have less-than-creative partners who need regular jobs to get by.
I agree, and I didn't mean creatives exclusively. More like, "mostly people who want to work on their own projects" as opposed to, like, radical isolationists or farmers or something.
> Do you snatch up cheap-but-remote housing in your own country? I know I don't.
Yeah, because by myself, I don't really have the funds to do so. :)
> These just seem exotic and enticing but I imagine they're an expensive pain to fix up in reality.
I agree, and I'm not talking about the villages in the article exclusively. Communes and ecovillages[1] have been successful in the past.
Something tells me if you fill a village with people of your choice, you'll get homogeneity. And without the chance interactions with diverse people and perspectives, those creative people will feel a bit less creative.
I would love to be able go to a place where like-minded people come and live for a while (weeks, months), working on their projects, while surrounded by neighbours they can engage with and discuss interesting ideas, but also with cool events going on around the village.
A kind of a permanent 'boot camp' which you can visit at any time.
Some old forgotten village in the mountains, inhabited by programmers, sysadmins and designers (with family/ kids of course) , with fast Internet, night time parties with visiting DJs, cooking experiments, group sports, hiking in the mountins, fishing, camp fires; tech conferences in the village center with invited speakers, meetups and hacklabs.
Actually I am, and coincidentally I have been joking with the same idea for several years.
In the last 2 years the idea became more tempting I investigated which kind of villages were in Spain and what kind of work was needed to make this work.
As you might expect as prices goes down utilities, accessibility and general connection to the world decreases. But it is also true that even if not with those outrageously low prices there are several villages with just a few thousand inhabitants, all the utilities you might need, low prices and just at 20 minutes from well connected airports and the capital.
From this September we are moving to one of those in the Southern coast of Spain and try to implement a really simple model in which part of the community bring in economic resources and the rest brings in quality of life, all in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible way.
The ones bringing in the economic resources at the beginning would be mostly developers like myself or designers. The reason for that is they can move and work remotely quite easily and they are quite frequently looking for some more colleagues to work with in their projects or Startups (again, like myself).
The quality of life is something abstract depending on the members of the community, it could be anything from organizing bootcamps or accelerators to yoga, paragliding or having a good chef cooking for everyone.
We haven't yet started to make all the work to promote this but if anyone is interested or would like to participate I'm here to answer any questions.
Forget the mall. I raised the idea on here a few years ago of getting a group of hackers together to buy a skyscraper in Detroit or a group of houses all in one neighborhood.
Advantage is that there are both jobs and fiber available. However prices are much higher than a few years ago and skyscrapers downtown are scarce due to Chinese investors.
One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. Areas that are depopulating wouldn't seem like good candidates for cell service or wired internet, let alone fiber to the home.
Also, there are definitely people whose ideal living circumstances would be on a farm without restaurants or other city amenities. My paternal grandfather retired from the city to a farm. But he did it after my grandmother died. And his kids were grown - no need for schooling.
Articles here have talked about Japan having the same type of problem. And so do American farming communities in the midwest. For every farmer (or wannabe) there seems to be thousands or tens of thousands who don't want to leave the city. And that's accelerating.
> One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video.
I know this isn't really your point, but video is actually one of the better use-cases for satellite internet. The problem with Satellite isn't bandwidth (I mean, it is, but that's only because most of them are old and there aren't enough of them.)
The fundamental problem with satellite internet is latency; the speed of light to get up to where we usually put 'em and back down is... significant.
The only realistic way to overcome that is to put the satellite in a much lower (and thus much less stable) orbit, which means replacing them frequently; there have been a bunch of cool-sounding proposals to do this, but it hasn't happened.
But... the point is that satellite is great for non-interactive stuff. If you can buffer, say, half a second without causing problems, there's no reason why you would be unhappy with Satellite, so streaming video would work beautifully.
Games and skype would be unusable. Web pages would load noticeably slower. But your streaming video and large downloads, potentially, would be competitive with the shitty broadband we're used to here in the US.
I think you might be pleasantly surprised by the level of connectivity in Europe.
Nothing is too far from anything else. These "distant villages" are probably bathed in an easy to pick up 3g signal that you would share with precisely no-one. Your own 4 or 5 megabit connection.
My family comes from a small Spanish village just like those in the article, and they have more than one broadband provider offering service (ADSL, no fiber yet, IIRC). You can also get a decent 4G signal if you're lucky not to be blocked by any mountain.
If you were to fill a full village with well-off people, I think you could get some ISP to connect you.
I think the first question to answer is why would you do it? Kibbutzim work and they can be wonderful, but they're created often with very specific ideas in mind, like a communal way of life or a desire for ethnic homogeneity, not simply 'oh the land is cheap, what if we started a town there'. I can't think of a lot of benefits over starting a private space within the richness and diversity of an existing city, like say the mall idea you mentioned. (which is restricted by law, not by interest. There are legal restrictions that prohibit housing in offices or shopping areas which I think make a lot of sense, but it'd certainly be great if they were more flexible. For example in my city there's enormous housing shortages, and office surpluses, and companies offering to convert office units to housing, but the government rarely changes city planning for which legitimate reasons sometimes also exist, but it can be really frustrating)
I like both ideas. I would live in the former and invest in the second.
I am not entirely sure you would want smart people only in the village. I think you should have a great mix of people, who share similar values and ethics.
At any rate if the exercise of setting up a small town interests you, the Republic of Plato as well as The Social Contract give you some good starting point. At least philosophically.
The article is essentially about falling Demographics, its a giant issue looming in not just Spain, but most of the EU, Japan and China. Three generations now where birthrates have been below replacement level. The affects are already seen in Greece and other places like these villages, in ten years time when most of the Boomers are over 65, we have some very serious issues.
Falling demographic is one issue, but the problem here is also due to urbanization[0]. My wife's village in Spain has a population between 50-100 during winter time and jump to over 1000 in summer time where families are back for holiday. Those people are not tourist, they are the sons, and grand-sons of the village.
Plenty of people still, just not enough jobs to keep them around all year round.
[0] Edit: Another point worth noting - real estate in the villages, even live one is extremely cheap compared to Spanish cities. You will find large houses with patio, and everything for around 10K EUR. So 10K for a whole village is not as extreme as one may think. You will still need at least 100K for a very shitty 2 bed in an average area of Madrid.
And once a small town goes below some threshold, it becomes much harder to live there because of the lack of job options (e.g. in a big city you can more easily work as a psychologist, office clerk or barmaid; in a town of 300 people, of which 80 are in retirement, it's a lot less likely).
Also, many old manual jobs are shunned by youngsters, or have been mechanized/automated, so doing "what your grandpa did in the old village", is not generally a realistic option.
I sure for government and industrialist types an endless supply of cheap labor to depress wages is a good thing. I question whether it's good for the average German, though.
Yet, the opposite of falling demographics is a giant issue looming over Europe - because of the incredible high nativity of Africa and the waves of refugees to Europe.
"African mothers have an average of 5.2 children, rising to 7.6 in Niger, the country with the world's highest fertility rate that is close to five times the European average of 1.6 children born to each woman.
The baby boom means that its current population of 1.1 billion will increase to at least 2.4 billion by the middle of the century, according to the study from the respected organisation."
The Telegraph is using old fertility numbers, on purpose I guess...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=fertility+in+africa gives 4.7 children per female, but I wonder if the average is weighted per contry population, as the high fertility countries have a very small population, and the highly populated one being way below that (exception for Nigeria).
well considering they need homes it seems government resources could be used to settle them in villages similar to this with access to land to allow them to keep their community. It certainly should cost less and if you find a tight knit group they are likely to work hard to improve the area.
Not really; like FranOntanaya pointed out, most of these buildings are just four crumbling stone walls and a roof (with luck). And it doesn't help that Galicia is very humid. It'd be much cheaper to tear them down and build a new house on the same land. And much cheaper still, of course, is making large apartment buildings.
Besides, it's not clear that those immigrants would actually stay there. Like the people who left, they probably also want jobs and access to stuff (cheap grocery stores, entertainment, etc). These villages are in the middle of nowhere, often connected by narrow and curvy roads that surround the mountains.
EDIT: Also, one of the reasons why they're abandoned, is because many of the houses / terrains are more than 100 years old, the property now belongs to dozens of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, and it's a pain to get them all to sign off to the sale.
For example, my greatgrandparent's land has been passed to their 13 sons and daughters, each of whom have had 2-4 kids of their own, etc. I think my mother owns about ~1/26 of the property.
If I had the money, I'd buy all 400 of these villages, and demolish them (save for a few historic buildings). Let them turn back into forest.
Then I'd identify one village that was a good candidate for development. Start a new town with high density housing, walkable streets, and greenways. Require a green building code. Design great public transit. Eventually, ban cars. I would name this great city "Normville," after myself.
Oh, then you don't need to buy them, just wait a while. With very few exceptions (mostly a few "ecohouses" for foreign tourists), no developer touches those villages with a ten foot pole. Between the desertification of the region, the crashed real estate market and the cost of rebuilding those houses, the average return is probably between "terrible" and "catastrophic".
Not to mention the qualification of "... if the ownership rights were determined." Nothing like making a substantial investment and then -- if you actually turn it around -- having a couple dozen claimants pop up suing you for illegally occupying their ancestral/childhood lands.
Yeah, as @icebraining said, I kinda commented prematurely. Just the idea of buying a big architectural structure felt like an adult version of playing with LEGOs.
It wasn't really sold for €10k, it was just a rejected offer. Other companies have offered tens of millions and were also rejected (they must show they have the means to actually fix and run the airport).
Once the majority of people can work remotely, and network infrastructure is accessible in these areas they will instantly become desirable replacing suburbs and leaving the cities for the young, free and single.
Yes, but the jobs are already in the city. My guess is that there are plenty of city people who would like the option to work outside. There will be less people stuck in the country because there job is based there.
The only real advantage over any other random off the grid country side location is that building permits are a lot easier on existing constructions, even if they are crumbling and they have to be completely rebuilt.