He barely knows how to speak Spanish and until a few months ago he had never been in Europe, but navigating the Internet saw that there was an uninhabited town of empty Spain, in the province of Zamora (northwest Spanish) and that has changed the life of the American Jason Lee Lee Beckwith.
He bought for 310,000 euros, less than a house in many Spanish cities, an entire village of the line, the border area with Portugal, less than forty kilometers from the city of Zamora: “Although it sounds like crazy, I knew that this was my future,” he confesses in statements to Efe.
He and his wife will be the first registered of the last twenty years in Salto de Castro, an idyllic hydroelectric town with forty -four homes, hostel, bar, pool, church, an old barracks and sports facilities.
The operation of the dam and moving most of the workers who inhabited it entered into misfortune in 1989.
Californian Jason Lee Beckwith explains that, after a lifetime working in a printing press, his work career took a turn six years ago, when in his country he set up a small housing and breakfast business that was successful and then transferred him to take a sabbatical year.
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From a cave house to a whole town In Spain
Then he thought about another hotel establishment and initially searched for sites in the United States, but his wife, who is Brazilian, proposed that something in Portugal also looked at him. From there he took to buy a cave house in Granada (South Spanish), until he ran into the news that there was a town for sale at the border between Spain and Portugal, which suffers a serious problem of rural depopulation.
“It was as if a switch was on in my head,” he says before explaining that he continued looking for other properties, but that he was strongly around the idea of buying it.
To be removed from the head, his wife encouraged him to travel to Spain, he who had never crossed the Atlantic, to see the people and convince himself that “that was too much, an entire town, too much work,” he recalls now.
“As soon as I started walking the streets and seeing around me all the crumbled ruins I knew that this was my future,” he recalls.
Hotel and shelter
After formalizing the purchase at the end of last year, he has returned to Spain. And newcomer to the Zamora train station, details to Efe his future plans for Salto de Castro, where he intends to go to live at the end of the year with his wife.
His idea is to open a hotel, a shelter, seasonal apartments, space for digital nomads and long -stay rental houses, “something for everyone’s pockets.”
More than five million investment
But the whole project will develop little by little, because the work is a lot and estimates that the investment can amount to five or six million euros.
The first thing you want to rehabilitate is the Church, to host all kinds of ceremonies, the pool and one of the buildings.
The return to the life of Salto de Castro intends to carry it out preserving the original architecture and harmony with the surroundings of the Biosphere Reserve of the Iberian Plateau where it is located. “It’s never going to change and I love that, we are not going to build Disneyland,” he clarifies.
Nor does it have the Californians or the Americans as a target audience for the hotel project, but proposes it mainly for the Spaniards, although everyone will be welcome.
Love for Spain and a tattoo
“I love Spain and this is what I can do to win my place,” he says to add that his “mission” is to recover, over time, that Zamorano people.
His idyll with Salto de Castro has also led him to proudly show a tattoo of the arm with the name of ‘Don Castro’, so that the indelible ink allows him to see daily the dream he is fulfilling and the new direction he has given to his life.
With EFE information.
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