Thirty-five kilometers south of Madrid is Seseña, a beautiful city. A ghost city. In 2003, when the real estate market was at its best, local authorities launched an ambitious project dubbed the “Manhattan of La Mancha”.
Photo: Xie Haining / Xinhua
The vision of its developer Francisco Hernando was a satellite city of Madrid with fast and efficient access between Madrid and Sesena to enable residents of the satellite city to commute daily between home and work.
Sesena’s residents would have enjoyed a good lifestyle for reasonable prices. The project included 13,000 housing units, which could have hosted more than 30,000 people, making Sesena an “Utopy of the middle class “. But not long after work had begun, the real estate bubble burst.
Fracisco Hernando had already built 5100 housing units by then. Most of them couldn’t be sold though, so the real estate company stopped works.
More than 2,000 houses in Sesena were put in mortgage in order to reimburse bank loans, but this is not enough. Despite selling Sesena’s houses at the price of 60,000 euros, which is very low, no one wants to buy them. When we went there for the first time in summer 2012, there was almost no one. Nowadays the situation has improved a little bit. Low prices attracted some 3,000 people to Sesena. But this small gathering occupies only a minor portion of the city. Around them, brand new empty buildings are lining streets that go nowhere.
Sesena – The Ghost City Of Spain Thirty-five kilometers south of Madrid is Seseña, a beautiful city. A ghost city. In 2003, when the real estate market was at its best, local authorities launched an ambitious project dubbed the "Manhattan of La Mancha".
