Some years ago, after selling their bed-and-breakfast in San Diego County, Jason Lee Beckwith and his wife began looking for hospitality property elsewhere. Their search moved progressively outward: Palomar Mountain, Joshua Tree, Portugal, Spain. In Grenada, Beckwith became briefly interested in some dwellings built into a cave on the side of a cliff, “but it just didn’t stick”.
Then one day, he stumbled upon an article about an abandoned village in Spain that was up for sale — complete with a church, school, bar and even a swimming pool. He describes this as the moment his life split into “before I knew it and after I knew it”.
In 2024, Beckwith made his first down payment on that property.
Throughout Europe, there are thousands of quaint, attractive villages that are functionally deserted, depopulated over decades by residents in search of employment elsewhere. In Spain, Portugal and Italy, the problem of rural “desertification” has grown so dire it has become a political issue. In those countries, one can easily find an entire village for sale, some for well under €1 million.
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Some of the villages are sold outright by a single entity or family owner. Others under fragmented ownership must be acquired property by property, which can require tracking down distant heirs.
Wealthy buyers and tourism entrepreneurs have transformed them into isolated getaways — and at least a handful have become popular destinations for corporate retreats.
Beckwith’s village, Salto de Castro, sits along a river near the Portuguese border and will cost him €310,000 to acquire. Built in 1946 by an energy company for its workers and long abandoned, it is now a “city in ruins, just rubble and walls”, he says. The Californian estimates the renovation will cost €7 million.
“It’s been a rollercoaster, honestly,” he says. “Good or bad, I’ve been enjoying the ride.”
Elvira Fafian, whose website Aldeas Abandonadas (“Abandoned Villages”) specialises in unusual Spanish real estate sales, has seen a steady increase in foreign buyers seeking out “hamlets, villages,and rural complexes”, she says, noting that 70 per cent of sales are intended for “business and tourism use”.
[ ‘It’s all over’: Across Europe remote villages are fadingOpens in new window ]
Timur Negru, whose company AffordiHome connects foreign buyers with European properties, has been fielding a surge in Americans interested in acquiring villages in recent months. He chalks up the attraction of the village to three recent trends: easy internet access in remote areas through platforms such as Starlink; the push away from overwhelmed tourist destinations such as Florence, or Barcelona; and the steep real estate prices in the US spurring buyers to look farther afield. His clients range from venture capitalist-backed entrepreneurs to small investment funds.
In 2021, Johannes Hoyos, a German entrepreneur, noticed that many such villages were available to rent nearly outright. He and his brother imagined a clever niche. “We said, ‘Let’s try to build a company around this idea of bringing people into villages.’” Today their company, Campfire, has organised village retreats for teams from companies including Dell, Google and Netflix, mostly in southern Europe. As some CEOs seek slow disconnection from daily distractions over flashy resort packages, they and others see abandoned European villages as the next hot spot for corporate retreats.
“Remote work made monthlong stays normal,” Negru says. “Teams want quarterly off-sites that aren’t generic hotels.”
Matteo Cerri, whose company, ITS Italy, is working to refurbish two dozen villages for use as corporate retreats and other tourism ventures, has also seen an uptick in interest from both renters and buyers. “It mostly works in terms of connections,” he says. “A guy knows a guy at, say, Y Combinator, who wants to spend 10 days in a village.”
Some find the idea of acquiring an entire village distasteful or worry that it will lead to a “Disneyfication” of rural Europe. These concerns aren’t new: Giancarlo Dall’Ara, an Italian marketing professor, developed a framework to prevent gaudy development in depopulated rural areas as far back as the 1980s.
If villages are growing as a corporate retreat attraction, Dall’Ara says, it is because “they offer an authentic environment that appeals to organisations tired of standardised and anonymous locations”.
Negru believes criticism of entrepreneurs who are buying villages misses the mark. “People forget one thing, which is that these villages have been abandoned for a long time,” he says. “It’s a good thing, if everything is done properly, for foreign investment to come in and give these villages a second life, provide jobs for the locals and so on.”
The buying is only the first step, noted Nuno Constantino, a Portuguese entrepreneur. “The major cost is not acquiring the land, it’s the cost of renovation,” he says. That stage, he says, can be “a nightmare.”
His company, Wotels, manages a renovated village in southern Portugal called Aldeia da Pedralva. The property, which cost aboutround €5 million to purchase and renovate, features a restaurant and a cafe, 38 rooms for guests and a reception area. Wotels also own the main plaza, which dates to the late 1800s, and the company is working with the municipality to convert the original school into a museum-cum-event-space. To rent out the whole thing costs upward of €7,000 per day in the summer — less than what many companies spend on urban conference hotels.
But the appeal is about more than competitive costs, Hoyos says. He ties the rising popularity of villages to the epidemic of loneliness plaguing the developed world. “‘Village’ is this old notion of a small, tight-knit community that’s embedded in nature,” he says. “There is the priest, the mayor, the carpenter and they all live their lives together.” In his view, the pull of the village for companies, especially ones that have gone fully remote, is a kind of “counterreaction” to the disarray and atomisation of modern life.
[ ‘Natural population’ falls in 15 areas, from Belmullet to Dún LaoghaireOpens in new window ]
Whether abandoned villages become the next corporate retreat hot spot or just another real estate curiosity will depend on whether companies see disconnection as a quarterly necessity or an inconvenient indulgence (remote areas are, by definition, a pain to reach). But some are hopeful. The village, once abandoned because it couldn’t keep up with the economic demands of modern life, might be valuable again precisely because it offers an escape from them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
