5 hectares with no water or permit for €60,000, forum user claims

5 hectares for €60,000, according to a forum user: no water, no permit

What does it really cost to leave the city and buy a plot of land? Sixty thousand euros. That is the figure that, according to a forum user, a 29-year-old who introduces himself as Guillermo paid for 5 hectares of land. The video he uses to launch his project —an old shed, dry woodland and silence— has peine the awkward question: is it a real way out or an expensive whim?

What a hectare of dry farmland costs compared to renting in Barcelona

The calculation going around is brutally simple. The claim is that a hectare of dry woodland with an old shed listed in the deeds can be had for a few thousand euros — what you'd spend in a few months of rent in Barcelona — and that you're an hour and a half from the city. Another case is cited: 20,000 square metres of land in the mountains of Castellón.

Can you legally live on rural land with no water and no permit?

Here comes the fine print. On rustic land the usual option is not a home but the caseta de aperos (a farm tool shed): a tool room that has stood for decades, appears in the deeds and does not make the land buildable. Water, unless there's a well or a mains connection, comes from the rain. Some people are working out how much rain nearly 5 hectares of sloping land could collect. And there's the administrative detail: it's pointed out that a local council can refuse to register you on the electoral roll because the land is non-developable.

Antiestéticar of squatting and safety in the countryside

Much of the conversation drifted towards the antiestéticar of someone entering the property when nobody is around. One forum user raises it, arguing that insecurity and the supposed lack of protection for private property discourage investing in bricks or land. In response, another participant offers a simple idea: with someone living there on a regular basis, the risk of theft from an isolated house plummets. Presence, not a fence, is the alarm.

The fine print that doesn't appear in the video

Work, solitude and routine. A participant who did something similar years ago warns that the countryside offers more work than you can handle and doubts the project will last long. That's no small detail: the cost of the land is the cheap part. Add a curiosity shared by a forum user from the area: in the countryside there are trees with shrapnel fragments from the Civil War embedded in their trunks, and sawmills run metal detectors over the wood before cutting it.

With all this, you'd think half of Spain should be buying dry farmland. It remains a loud minority on the internet. Cheap land was never the problem; living off it isn't free either.