Even if boomed from the start, how ugly and sterile. All the empty land and no sign of a patio. Are geranium plants banned architextuality? I see no way to hang or balance pots of them. The near empty houses look like good behavior prison housing.
Sad and depressing. What a contrast to the gardens of Atocha, their railroad station in Madrid.
4
There are plenty of ghost towns to go around from 2008.. many inside the US..and a good number have never recovered were simply bulldozed to get rid of them.
1
There are some great ghost town photos here: https://www.abandonedspaces.com/towns/the-brand-new-empty-town-of-valdeluz-in-the-middle-of-spain.html
3
@Ben Looks so soviet industrial!
Will they take expats running away from Trump? I can visualize a immigration plan right now.
31
I'm a little surprised to hear that golf courses are mentioned as a great idea for this part of Spain. It's a dry country, with limited water resources, is it not? Seems like they'd be looking at their warming climate and thinking that golf courses aren't the best idea.
20
The Spanish simply call the 2008 world-wide financial meltdown 'the crisis'. It was a bubble burst of epic proportions. 0ne out of every four employed Spaniards worked in construction or real estate. The forests of 12 story residential towers built in the last decade of Franco that surround Madrid were emptying of families moving to suburban single family homes called 'chalets'. Along the coast and on islands in the Mediterranean, the Spanish were building as fast as the concrete could dry, confident that there was an endless supply of Germans and other northerners who would buy whatever they built. Spain was now part of Europe and the bankers would never betray their confidence. The new currency, the Euro, was the symbol of this unity. That's not how it worked out at all. Valdeluz was part of the last failed wave of suburban development. There are dozens of stations at the end of the Madrid subway system that lead to empty towns like this one. A united Europe, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Greeks soon realized, was just a beautiful dream from which they were abruptly awakened in 2008. The children that were supposed to raise new families in these ghost towns are now working in England, Germany, France and the Low Countries or still at home eking out a meager existence as 'mil eurarios', living on stipends of around a thousand euros a month in temp jobs without a promising future. reality bites.
26
Nicely written and photographed. Oddly, the photos remind me of Pripyat, near Chernobyl. Anyone else get that feeling?
8
@cxbrx Have a look at the aerial photography of David Maisel. His beautiful images, especially those called "Vicalvaro" give an eerily similar bombed out feeling. https://davidmaisel.com/works/the-fall/#15
Maisel was invited to Spain in 2013 as part of the photographic project ToledoContemporánea, in which twelve photographers were commissioned to create work about the Spanish city of Toledo as a celebration of the fourth centennial of the painter El Greco. Maisel’s work in The Fall is his response to the areas between the city of Toledo, which was once the cultural epicenter of Europe, and the much larger capital city of Madrid. In The Fall, one feels that the worlds of painting and photography have merged together. The series is based on three different areas of the Spanish landscape.
3
What is the use of this remark? "Anyone else" can see that it a positive place against the backdrop of a plain and beatiful mountains (sierra) just 40 miles from Madrid.