Part 1 - Spain
Deserted avenues, closed roads, abandoned construction sites and vacant buildings: the ghost towns, everywhere in Spain, are the result of a real estate frenzy, a countrywide boom in construction, promptly stopped by the crisis and the 2007 real estate bubble burst. At the end of 2009, the country was left with 3,6 million completed or underway housing.
The new owners who believed in the dream announced by the billboards, crash into a different reality. Between closed shutters and apartments with signs indicating “for sale”, they finally find themselves to be the lonely resident of the entire building. Public services such as transports, health centre, waste management, education or security, frequently do not exist and neglect the few inhabitants submerged by the maintenance costs of the buildings which are deteriorating before their eyes.
An isolation and abandonment feeling is real: the ghost towns do not appear in the GPS and the majority of the streets do not have a name. Life seems to have been aborted before even settling.
