Laurence Dollimore
THIS is the behind the scenes look at an award-winning photography series cataloging Spain’s abandoned homes.
Mark Redondo has spent nearly a decade documenting the millions of homes left empty following the 2007/8 global financial crash.
By 2011, Spanish census figures put the number of empty houses at 3.4 million, roughly 30% of all of Europe’s empty property.
Around a half million developments were only partially completed.
Redondo revisited some of the original properties he photographed this year, for a second installment called Sand Castles (part II).
The British Journal of Photography’s DJI Drone Photography Awards funded the project.
Redondo said: “I wanted to present the developments like postcards,” he told the British
“In the way that the developers and constructors would have imagined them, with nice light, but obviously with the feeling that something is wrong.”
The new perspective also puts the developments in a stark contrast to their surrounding areas.
“I knew the developments were big, but I could not imagine their true extent,” he added.
“The sites are completely deserted and the locations are difficult to reach so, unless you are determined to go there, most people don’t ever see them.”
Yes, some of this trash from 2008 may be ‘admired’ nearby Marbella:
Leave the road A7176 from Marbella to Istán at Cerros del Lago (a old British urbanisation) and turn right into the new road to “Sierra Blanca Country Club”. 100m in front of the barrier to the club, there runs a dirt road uphill into the Sierra Blanca. It ends on a meadow for goats where Swiss investor “Swissmadehomes” has left the shells of some 10 new houses. They stopped the development in 2008. To get room for these ruins, Swissmadehomes had blown up big holes into the rocks of Sierra Blanca which since then remain as a big read wound. They also intercepted the official hiking path from Marbella to Istán.
Another architectural sin may be visited at Benahavis. Just after the big roundabout at the entrance of Benahavis turn left and take the steep construction road uphills. On top of the hills, you feel to be in a moonscape as some large dirtroads have been rolled into the woods which should become roads of a new urbanisation. But they never started building houses and the dirt roads remained.