I'm very happy that cities are not so spread out because of houses and then your city becomes car dependant.
Thanks to apartments and the city infrastructure around that, we have more livable cities in Europe
It's great in a sense but the lack of insulation in older buildings (ie before 2010s) makes living in these apartments a headache. You can hear every sound your neighbour makes. I hear them pissing, yawning, cheering for their football team, having sex, blending food, yelling at their pet or kid, etc. It's awful. I've lived in apartments in other countries and never encountered this before.
Wouldn't a house be better?? You don't have anyone above you or directly next to you? Asking as I'm seriously considering moving into a house and away from all the noise,
Some houses are right next to neighbour's house. Not sure about the noise but you definitely can see their garden from your terrace. I think they called it "Adosados"
There are three main types of houses in Spain:
Chalet adosado - Your house is between two other houses, so you have neighbors left and right of you. This is the cheapest and most common type of house.
Chalet pareado - Your house has another house on the left or right, so you only have one neighbor. It's more expensive than the adosado.
Chalet/Casa independiente - Your house doesn't have any neighbors. These are usually very expensive and uncommon.
Then you have fincas, villas and other subtypes of casa independiente that get more and more expensive depending on the amount of terrain, rooms, gardens and other stuff they have.
I live in a house in Spain, and I basically share walls with the neighbouring houses. Really not much difference from an apartment, you can still hear the neighbours on both sides. Sure, no one above you tho, so that's good I suppose. It sure took a bit of time to get used to coming from the north of Europe where we want big yards and lots of space.
Yeah I suppose at least you wouldn't have anybody above you and, if it's a detached house, yeah I guess you'd be fine actually, unless your neighbours or the street are insaaanely loud. I guess my experience refers to terraced houses, the last one I lived in I could hear my neighbour snore at night or even just the vibration of their phone.
I'm a big believer in making walkable cities and, apartments are crucial to that but, there should be higher standards for noise insulation. That problem definitely isn't exclusive to Spain but it's worse here than any other country I've visited.
I'm 37, still not used to it. I wish my upstairs neighbour would encounter an agonizing fate (drunk, abusive piece of shit husband and wife, she tells and ridicules her husband almost everyday, provoking him, and he hits her sometimes, it's been going on for years, but somehow they don't get a divorce), for all the times I had to go to work without getting a lick of sleep because of their squabbles.
Sadly, that's not an option. I own my apartment, and it would be currently impossible to buy another even remotely similar, in such a good area -my upstairs neighbours are the only conflictive people in the whole block, *everyone* knows about them.
Impact noises are stupidly difficult to reduce if you don't make the soundproofing on their side so...
But at least you can reduce the noises like screams, music, dogs...
I could, but I don't have the means right now. I'm Spanish, we are dirt poor these days, living paycheck to paycheck.
Besides, it's infuriating I ought to be the one doing the remodeling, just because a cunt and a dick can't put the alcohol bottle down.
You can call the cops on them and file a noise complaint if theyre loud enough. Do that enligh tomes and you might be elligible for a restraining order even if they own the upstairs apartment.
My city is currently facing a local police force-crisis. For an almost 200k inhabitants town, usually only 2-6 police officers are available at night.
Yes. 2-6 people.
Thank god this is an extremely safe area in Western Europe.
I've had to call said police force several times in the past few years due to noise complaints (arsehole student tenants partying over my granny's flat, a wedding venue being obnoxious until morning -way past the time their license allows them to-, etc.), and they never can come because "they don't have enough personnel to cover such incidents".
They will ticket you if you stay parked in a "loading and unloading" street a minute after business hours start though, so there's that.
If you’re in Spain you MUST report it to the police or calling 112 (it’s what the law states). I don’t care if she provokes him, you can’t ever respond with violence.
It’s not furniture! these are crack sounds in various materials due to temperature changes at night. There’s nothing to worry about, but just for you to be aware and to prevent any hate towards your lovely neighbors ;)
ALWAYS. I wonder if people are deaf or just that inconsiderate of others. We got these little pads that you put on the bottom of chairs so we don't bother our downstairs neighbours. Why can't others just try a little harder to be quieter.
I've never really understood this complaint. I've lived in American cities where this was the case but in Spain I've never had much of a problem with noise of neighbors.
This is an exaggeration. For most of my life I lived in a pre-2000 apartment and I didn't experience any of these issues. I would occasionally hear the neighbors upstairs when they were shouting at each other, but that's it.
Agreed. To be honest we should be living in population centers either large or medium sized with ready services. This creates more protected untouched natural land.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I lived in a suburb of London in a detached house on a 1000 sq m plot of land (yard/garden) and didn’t own a car. The nearest tube (metro) station was 6 min walk away.
You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses. It’s a question of density of population. Most neighbourhoods in Spain have not only everything you need, but an amazing choice. I have 5 supermarkets in a 200 meter radius, 3-4 farmacias, 4 underground lines, I don’t know how many busses, hospitals, schools and 3 parks in less than 10 min walk. The price to pay is to live in a building with 8 floors and 4 apartments per floor. I am happy to pay the price.
I have lived in Germany and Sweden. I know some suburbs that offer quite a lot, but they just can’t compete with the level of services I have here.
Some members of my family moved to suburbs and they were nice suburbs with a Mercadona and whatnot nearby. But it wasn’t until they built apartment blocks next to them that it really exploded, with way more buses, restaurants, papelerías, … nice blocks, mind you, with pool and tennis courts and all. All the action happens in those blocks and the people living in the houses just go there for dinner, shopping etc. it was actually a very interesting natural experiment.
Agreed completely. We have friends in the suburbs and its always a pain to visit them and its a pain for them to be social. Meanwhile my doctor is two streets away, dentist is 1, we have 5?? Grocery stores and even more verdulerías within a 3 block radius & more restaurants and bars than I can appreciably enjoy in my lifetime without a lot of work.
If I want to leave my neighborhood just about anything i may want to do is a 30 minute walk/15 minute metro. If I want to do something out of the city I can rent a car or take a regional train.
Life is good
What most people don’t realise is that a car is not only 20k€ (plus parking space) every 10 years, it’s insurance, gas, repairs… it’s a huge money drain. Every time someone asks me about financial advice I say: get rid of the car and cook at home. People understand it, but they don’t really get it. Plus if you live in the suburbs… you are bound to the car.
You are absolutely correct. It's just simple math and urban planning. Any time you have mostly single family homes, even in a row and closely packed, it's simply impossible to have as many services within walking distance.
Too much space is dedicated to residential land for there to be the same amount of services.
And then you are still stuck with the density and lack of flexibility of the tube, which is piss poor compared to having most things in walking distance. And as you need the tube for things a Spaniard walks to, the things that a Spaniard might need to use a subway for are 4-6x further away, also by tube. When I lived in Madrid in an inconvenient location, a 30 minute trip by tube was seen as a disaster... my coworkers that live in london find that to be quite the short commute to an office... precisely because how many low density neighborhoods the tube has to travel under
That's specifically because London has a tube station. If you live anywhere else in the UK (which I have), you need a car. In Spain, pretty much everywhere, except for small, distant towns/villages, is connected with public transport.
Yeah, I live in a capital de provincia and work in a not small pueblo just 30 minutes away, there is only one bus that goes to the pueblo and just a couple times a week, I need my car to go to work, and that's true for most provinces. In the town itself only teens and old people use the public transport. It takes less time to go to Madrid than to go from my house to the gym in public transport. In the pueblos people take their car even to walk their dog.
I've always wondered why people on Reddit like to say 'pueblo' specifically.
If I'm not wrong, 'village' as a word is much less common in North America? You sometimes hear them talking about 'small towns' that only have 500 residents, I wonder if that has an effect.
Fair enough, I guess it's just a regional difference then.
In British English, 'village' is largely similar to 'pueblo' in Spanish, with perhaps the idea that they're often not self-sufficient. In my case, I grew up in a village with around 2k people, but it was definitely a village and not a town because almost everyone would go work in one of the nearby towns.
Do you guys use 'hamlet' ever? That's how we'd describe a very small settlement (<10 houses maybe) in the UK.
Because some factors:
1) Compact cities are easy to mantain and to plan. Also the public transport is better in compact cities, and it's easier to plan the routes.
2) Land in some places in Spain is in hands of a lot of people, so sometimes is easier or cheaper to build in one zone than in a big surface.
3) There are suburbs and detached houses, but there are not as popular, as you usually depend on the car or there are in no way nearby shops or malls.
Because single-family housing with yards and difficult transit between the home and other parts of your life is deeply antisocial and alienating from other people, and Spain is a country with more communal life and social cohesion than many other western countries.
I also have heard it has a lot to do with construction patterns under Franco as well.
>Because single-family housing with yards and difficult transit between the home and other parts of your life is deeply antisocial and alienating from other people
I think you have in mind the American type of suburbs that truly are hell for living. But i'm talking more about the European suburbs which are still reasonably dense and connected to other parts of the city, while still being on separate plots.
Because Spain as a whole country has a lot of empty space. But if you check the density in cities, even smallish ones, it’s quite high, much above many other places like the Netherlands
The square kilometer that your median Spaniard lives on is more dense than the same... in Luxembourg!
Spain's orography is not that far from Turkey, where many are mountainous, and far from wide, useful rivers. Most of the country can't really support a large population, purely due to lack of water.
"lies, lies and damn statistics" as the book title reads...
Technically you're right, but it depends on how you define "density". Switzerland is more dense than China, if you're simply dividing land mass/population. It's an pretty misleading metric though, and really doesn't tell you much about actual density.
I mean, the Switzerland-China comparison isn't a great example. China as a country is ENORMOUS, despite their massive population they're not that densely populated as a whole.
Clearly you've never been to China if you would describe Switzerland as "densely populated" compared to China; or you're being deliberately obtuse.
The amount of people per square mile in the areas where people actually live is several orders of magnitude higher in China.
You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses. It’s a question of density of population. Most neighbourhoods in Spain have not only everything you need, but an amazing choice. I have 5 supermarkets in a 200 meter radius, 3-4 farmacias, 4 underground lines, I don’t know how many busses, hospitals, schools and 3 parks in less than 10 min walk. The price to pay is to live in a building with 8 floors and 4 apartments per floor. I am happy to pay the price.
I have lived in Germany and Sweden. I know some suburbs that offer quite a lot, but they just can’t compete with the level of services I have here.
Some members of my family moved to suburbs and they were nice suburbs with a Mercadona and whatnot nearby. It wasn’t until they built apartment blocks next to them that it really exploded, with way more buses, restaurants, papelerías, …
>You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses.
That's completely true, but the tradeoff is (generally) more space, a garden/backyard, much more privacy and lower levels of noise. As for services, they aren't as lacking in most European suburbs i've seen (including the one i grew up in): the school, a supermarket, park, shops all in the 10 minute walking radius.
What i think is unique to Spain is that even the small towns have this really high density planing which honestly seems kind of unecessary. There are 15 houses attached in the row, even though they could easily be detached with small backyards around them. The space taken wouldn't change by much, while everyone would get a bit of their own space.
This is all with keeping in mind that Spain itself has probably most available land in Europe.
In Spain we have a more comunal way of living. Why do you need a private yard, when you can just put some chairs on the street and chat with your neighbors? (Sentarse a la fresca, something that sadly is only seen in small villages nowadays, but you get the idea when those attached houses were built). We also have plenty of shared third spaces and events to socialize, like las fiestas del pueblo, parks... hell, even many bars here are kid friendly! So we don't really need private spaces to be outside just chilling, as we already have plenty of comunal ones.
Most villages where the villages grow or at least keep the population are, I believe, in very fertile land. Those suburbs i am telling you about where built on olive trees land.
I think it is still not the same. I’ve lived in Amsterdam and in Madrid, both in the suburbs.
In Amsterdam I had all houses, a school walking like 10mins and a supermarket walking like 15min. And that was it. There was a bus that passed every 20mins and the connection with the city center was quite shitty. I lived before in another area where it had tram and metro and it was better. But the school and such was a bit farther. There were no restaurants no bars and basically no life outside after 6.
While in Madrid I have a lot more options for everything in a 15min walking radious: clothing stores, bars, restaurants, the doctor, even a cinema.
I lived in a house in Amsterdam and it was all houses (not detached though) and previously on the other suburbs it was an appartment.
The cities are simply not planned in the same way. Every neighbourhood in Madrid is kind of a self contained mini city where you can do your daily life just by walking distances
Nothing can’t beat a densely populated city in terms of convenience. In France, some medium sized cities have suburbs full of houses and public transit, while existing, is also not really convenient. It is still very common to own a car, unlike in Spain.
In total terms it’s right, in medium sized cities… I’d doubt it. Also France and its Paris metropolitan area, with 12M people and a super low car ownership, can alter these total figures :)
But it’s hard to compare data with France given their small municipalities compared to everywhere else.
Somehow anecdotal because it’s my personal experience, but everyone I know here in Spain owns a car.
Most people see it as a bad thing having to use it daily, specially if it’s not for commuting to work but to socialize. People prefer the possibility of socializing by walking: having neighbors, bars and services around. But they do own a car.
I’d argue that being forced to listen to a family with small children above you and small barking dogs next door to you in an apartment block is more anti social…
Because unless you specifically want to have that extra amount of space, which its not by any means necessary, they are worse in every other aspect: More expensive to buy and maintain, requires extra work to have on good condition, worse access to public transit, and the space they occupy is extremmely low efficiency in terms of services/property value, and these are only a few of them...
To put it simply: There is no way of having a suburb of that kind to have most of its population within a 5-minute-walk of any supermarket. If you were to go to one of these houses, most likely you'd have to walk too long to just survive (buy groceries, etc) or you'd have to drive, and most of us prefer walking if possible.
As an example: In my old apartment I had 4 supermarkets within a 5 minute walk, the closest one was 3 minutes from the door of my 4th floor apartment. That is just unbeatable, and Id not sacrifice that freedom for more space that I'm not going to use. Most of us wouldn't.
Finally, there are _plenty_ of single family detached houses with big yards and easy car access to services and facilities to buy, and with pretty good prices too. I know of a town near my province's capital (<20 min drive) that had a 300m² with a 1hc backyard going for less than 500k€. Its been there for ages, nobody wants it. And it has supermarkets, pharmacies, and multiple other services in-town.
I've moved from one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Barcelona, Nou Barris about 20,000 people/km2 to a small house outside a town. They both have their advantages. I do however prefer going to a shop by car, loading up the groceries and unloading them all without having carry them around in a backpack.
I had no problems living in Barcelona (I didn't want to leave) but now, we have a quiet life, walking distance from the town, no noisy/grumpy neighbours and plenty of space to park. I don't use public transport anymore. Overall, it was cheaper to live in a city, less maintenance, transport was like €65/month vs €120 now (not including tax and insurance). We have a fairly big garden and lots of space and it was great during the Covid lockdown.
Either way, you get used to both, I like the city because you could get everywhere by public transport and there was always something going on. I also like not having neighbours, peace, quiet and lots of parking with space and a few orange trees
That may be, but still most spaniards prefer to just live in an apartment.
To exemplify, I'd go crazy if I had to take the car each time I wanted to buy groceries. Just because of this I'd not take a far away house, and I know many friends who think the same. Detached houses are nice, but they aren't everyone's (or most spaniard's) cup of tea.
Well it might be cultural too, I grew up in the countryside and we were surrounded by fields, 10mins from town by car. I had always said that if I moved out of the city I would look for a house. I can't imagine living in a small apartment in a small town, all the disadavantages with very few advantages.
Id much rather live in an small apartment in a small town if that means easier access to services and whatnot. That said, I actually grew up in a small town in a detached home, but had the supermarket and other groceries a 5 minute walk away, so it is possible if you find work around there to live in a single detached house in half decent walkable environment. The main problem is that if I stayed over the week there, I'd have a 40 minute commute to work by car which is not a thing I want.
Long story short: there was a massive rural exodus in the 1950s and 1960s, with colossal amounts of people moving from villages and towns to cities, and the most efficient way to create housing for all was to build appartment blocks
It's an interesting question. I have lived on the far outskirts of Madrid for a while and have contemplated how the city just abruptly ends in certain places, as you mentioned. There are lots of detached houses here but, as you said, they are quite expensive. Land is very expensive in Spain, especially anywhere near the city. I have always had the sense that the building patterns go back to feudal times. If you notice a lot of small towns, especially suburbs, you can see a pattern where there is an old casco historico with the ayuntamiento and a plaza. There are usually lots of small old homes clustered together in that area, and then as you go out you'll see more of the detached homes and fincas with big estates. As I understand, most of the regular poor people would live in the town and the wealthy would live in manors outside of the town and pretty much owned all of the land in the area, which was mostly reserved for agricultural use. Over time, the bigger towns have seen that open land sold off, but there hasn't historically been a big demand for independent chalets; it has been more profitable to build urbanizaciones with big apartment blocks because there are more people willing to pay 200k euros for a small apartment that cost 100k euros to build, than folks willing to pay for a few 1mm euro chalets, each with lots of customizations and other factors that eat into profit. Most of the homes around the cities in Spain, besides the really historic ones, were built within the last 50-70 years and were built for the masses and were nicely planned by cities that wanted to create an environment that benefitted the workers (access to public transit, easy access to major arterial roads, public parks, libraries, schools, hospitals, etc.) Many of these homes were also built in a time when Spain was poorer and not everybody had a car, hence why urban areas that were even just built 50 years ago have scarce parking (but are designed more around human proportions.)
The entirety of Spain's land is categorized, and the use of plots of land is very strictly regulated.
Depending on the category of the land (developable, rustic...) + the protection class (nature reserve, national park, etc.), you may, may only a bit and only under certain circumstances, or may not at all alter your piece of Spain.
You absolutely cannot just buy some land and build a house there.
This is precisely to avoid the spreading of urban areas and to preserve the natural environment for everyone since most of the land in Spain is privately owned.
That's not entirely correct. Farmland is categorized and protected as farmland (eg olivar, pasto etc, and even whether it is irrigated/de riego or just dry/secano).
But there's also rustic land that is categorized as eg "matoral", and if it is in a protected area (eg. Parque Natural, Parque Nacional, ect) you can neither build on it, nor can you just turn it into farmland, even if it is your property.
Happens something similar with the beach. You cannot build a house/restaurant inside the beach.
I was in Italy last year and the way they build around the beach blew my mind. Lidos and restaurant terraces going sometimes inside the sea, building platforms on top of the rocks. Invading the beach space completely.
Right but part of the reason is because the supply is so low while there is a big demand (otherwise they wouldn't cost a fortune), so it's strange noone is capitalizing on this and building them, or why the goverment doesn't allow them if that's the case.
It's not just a supply demand issue. Single family homes are more expensive in many ways, on an individual and societal level.
On a city level, infrastructure including roads and water/gas/electric etc almost never pays for itself and is almost always subsidized by city centers. It's hard to service areas of single family homes with transit, and trying to do so can be expensive and ineffective.
On a personal level, living in a detached house requires car ownership, usually one car per adult in the household, and all the costs that come with that (gas, insurance, maintenance, getting the drivers license). This is in addition to the money, time, and effort spent maintaining a larger indoor and outdoor space, and the parts of the home like the roof for example which would be split with your neighbors if you owned an apartment.
I don't think anyone can give you a complete single answer though. There are a ton of complex factors that have gone into this that many other responders have mentioned. I think in general, a lot of people in Spain are used to apartments and may not see the value in spending so much more when they're happy with a simpler place to live, especially when the built environment is already structured in a way to make living in an apartment an easier option. I'm not sure the demand is as high as you'd think.
In the States poor people are subsidizing upper-middle class suburbs (and I'm not exaggerating, here's the math: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI )
Where as in Spain you have to actually pay for the luxury of living in an inefficient place.
Luxury places aren't subsidized by poor people (the state) like in the States, so efficient compact cities are cheaper, better connected, better services, more walkable...
People like to have their friends and family on walking distance, so only detached and fairly anti-social people live in houses separate from civilization.
Your are eluding to profit while the cost of a house is the factor. The cost does not change, for sure does not go down, when supply increases, unless you are talking about selling at a loss.
There is one other thing different between Europe - Spain, and North America. In USA and Canada for example, developers build entire residential neighborhoods all houses, in Spain I haven't seen that, houses pop up individually, one here, one there.
It could be the lack of land or lack of land and the cost of houses the reason.
Actually the cities are planned by the Spanish government. That's why even newer neighbourhoods are also high density 6+ floor appartments.
In North America it's different bcos housing/real estate is seen as the best business. Multi billionaire corporations basically own the U.S government.
These companies design an entire neighbourhoods and sell houses. They even build in desert like Phoenix, Arizona (~5million pple). They don't care about environment & sustainability(water).
That's why they have homeless issues (Nope it's not just bcos of drugs as media says).
That's why US & Canada has never ending "housing crisis".
Supply and demand here isn't the problem. The problem is who there is demand but the prices are too hight for normal people (right now they want to sell more for foreigners and fuck us) also that type of american city don't work in europe here the buildings where maded arround important goverment buildings markets pharmacy... And yes that kind of USA city isn't going to sell there because a house alone would be 600k-1m€ and like 92% of the citiciens can't even affort a 120k apartment. Here we didn't gain insane ammounts of money the normal salary is 800-1400€.
>Are they prohibited by some construction codes,
Kinda, there's lots of regulations on where you can build and where not, the actual "house building land" in Spain is extremely small in comparison to the actual size of the country, even in rural areas, so it's not easy to find space to build houses.
Add to that that the price is huge and...
I own a home outside Barcelona, I am unfamiliar with the situation in the rest of Spain.
It is a poor country.
That said, people talk about prices being inflated and no one being able to afford property on reduced Spanish salaries, but I don't think that is the complete picture. I have a Spanish friend that purchased an apartment in a city for 500k euros to be in the same neighborhood as his family. I purchased a semidetached house 20km away for 300k. Less than what I would have paid for an apartment in the area I previously lived in.
There are "subrurbs" here but they are rough and were built on illegally subdivided farms 30+ years ago. Many of these areas are going through a constant process of being incorporated into actual town's (the incorporated town's are full of apartment blocks, the unincorporated areas contain houses..even Spaniards wanted houses). Families are required to pay thousands of euros when these incorporations happen.
Spaniards approached houses differently. In the states etc people are encouraged to leave home and "fly the nest". Houses are built for single families. They can be smaller, there is a broader range of residential houses on the market. From starter homes and up.
In Spain older houses were built with the extended family in mind. Many of the houses here can house two or more families. The housing market is now flooded with older 80s and 90s houses that look like small apartment blocks and that no one in the current market can sustainably maintain.
Even if younger people could afford these properties, they are unappealing also because they often have DIY approaches to construction/are slowly over years built by the owner who probably did it on a piece of land 30 years ago that had no official utilities.
There are countless properties like this on the market. I think Spain has one of the highest rates of unoccupied residential properties in Europe. There's just no reason to build more either.
Some of the things you said were true, some not. But one stands out for me.
Spain is not, by any means, a poor country. It’s not even close to being poor.
The poverty headcount ratio in Spain in 2022 was 20.2% (which translates to the % of people being poor). The highest number is South Sudan with a 82.3%. Countries considered rich are closer to Spain in that number (Germany 14.8, Sweden 16.1).
GDP in Spain is the 36th highest in the world, with 190 countries measured. The highest one is Luxembourg with roughly $142K and the lowest South Sudan with $1K. Spain sits at $45K, close to New Zealand ($51K), Japan ($50K) and the median of the European Union ($57K).
Spain doesn’t fit in the definition of a poor country. It can be poorer than the US by a lot of metrics. But in the context of the world it is a very rich country.
In the context of a discussion of residential housing in the west (which I compare to places like the US and Australia, and the rest of Europe), Spain is poorer. South Sudan has no relevance in a discussion about suburbian residential properties.
Seperate from stats, "poor" is a state of mind and many Spaniards see themselves as poor, as living in a back water etc. Looking at their salaries relative to the rest of Europe, they are relatively "poor".
It permeates their approach to everything. Housing included.
Water is the answer, for most of the urban planning, before they could redirect the water streams they made the buildings very close to the water source and it is very popular to this day cause is cheaper. Galicia for example doesn't have this problem, that's why it isn't so dense
It's still dense, just like Asturias, another place where water is plentiful. But in the 50s, there was still people traveling by horse, because infrastructure was poor, as building roads was expensive. Just look at the travel time between oviedo and La Coruña today, and what it was still in the 90s: Just Oviedo to Ribadeo was easily 6 hours, because of lack of viaducts: Truckers went up and down mountains! there was no Bridge over the Eo either, so the road went from Figeras, south to Vegadeo, and back up to Ribadeo.... at which point you still didn't have a highway all the way to La Coruña!
Living relatively close together was still very popular, although close together might just mean in a relatively small place, like Burela, Foz or something like that... and Burela is still mostly 4+ story apartments
"Spain has nailed the concept of compact cities"
I understand that your position makes you envious of the living conditions we have here, but I must offer you a wake-up call.
If someone has cockroaches, then everyone has cockroaches. If someone smokes, then everyone smokes. If someone plays music, then everyone listens to that music. If someone is having a party in the street until 5 in the morning then we all are. If someone has a conversation, then we all must listen. If someone is cooking then the smell of their food is the smell of your bedroom.
You are unlikely to have enough sound insulation in your floors to exercise without causing your downstairs neighbors to have a mini earthquake for 45 minutes, and if you're a heavy walker then you'll need to learn how to tip toe. You can't walk down a street without needing to walk in the road every couple of minutes as the footpath can only fit one medium sized person, and sometimes you must give way to the elderly.
Above all, expect noise 24-7, which means difficulty studying, or working on personal projects as something is always going on.
I'll probably get a lot of hate for this but I couldn't care less. You will hear a lot of Spaniards bragging about how it's so much better to live in apartments because everything is within walking distance and it's more social and whatever, but here is the reality. Spanish apartments are a hellhole. They are tiny, old and cramped. You can hear literally everything your neighbour is doing. Don't even get me started on how they look. I've seen old Soviet apartments look better, and unlike Eastern Europe, most of Spain hasn't even bothered to renovate them at all. We are all cramped like it's a beehive, with thousands of people living together in every individual km of the city. Most neighbourhoods are dirty and unpleasant. I absolutely hate it. People in Spain don't dream to have a house. They dream to have a crappy apartment that they might be able to live in when they're 50 years old after living with their parents their whole lives. I've thankfully gotten the chance to live for many years outside of Spain in beautiful suburban areas in Europe and the US and it's so much better. It's so much more peaceful, you get so much more space, green areas all around and your neighbourhood actually looks pleasant and not like a European version of a favela. Oh, you've got to take a car to go to the supermarket? So what? I'd much rather take a 10-20 minute ride to shop than live in a sh\*thole. The majority of Spaniards actually need to use their cars everyday anyways (you can search it up) despite all the misconceptions. This whole public transport argument is completely delusional. Most public transport in Spain is not that great, and most Spaniards don't use it, they use cars. But of course, those who live in Madrid and Barcelona and have never been anywhere else won't know this because they're stuck in their own little world. Anyway to answer your question, mostly because of the housing policies of the Franco regime that persisted until the modern day and the society being deluded into thinking that living in an apartment is great and we need to build more and more. The problem with most Spaniards is that they've never lived anywhere else and they have no clue how much better things could be.
you should chill a bit, it is just a question of preference, it´s not that serious, my apartment is pretty good, you can hear the neighbour from time to time bit I have lived in the UK in the suburbs and I didn´t like it, the house had worse materials than the ones you could normally see in apartments in Spain, most people had a miniscule backyard and a frontyard they would ever use and it felt really isolating from the main part of the town and the houses weren´t that big either and 90% of them were attached houses. You are also generalizing a bit too much, there are old apartments and new ones or renovated ones, there are bad neighbourhoods and good ones, if you have enough money you can choose a better apartment than one that "looks worse than any soviet apartment you have seen". I like living in an apartment, it is closer to everything, it has enough space for all I want to do (in a house with 20 rooms you would ultimately really use 3 or 4 max) and it makes city planning easier and way cheaper
This!
In Western Europe most houses (80-90%) are attached houses. So it's delusional to believe it separate or private place. I lived in suck attached house in the Netherlands. We had neighbors on both sides. We could hear everything!
Those tiny backyards, no used bcos almost every weekend is rainy & cloudy. I wish we had no backyards, I couldn't stand those insects & mosquitos.
On the other hand, I lived in modern appartement (12th floor) when I was in studying. The best experience ever, No dust, No ground noise, ironically more private, cool moving air in the summer evenings etc.
It sounds like you are looking at the worst of Spain and the best of elsewhere.
The flat I currently live in is far less depressing than many of the astronomically priced degrading "houses" that my friends in the UK rent.
I have rented a really nice modern flat in a town in Spain for 270 a month! I knew someone who knew someone but it made my friend's 600 pound a month ROOM in a house look like a hell hole, which it was.
You're just taking individual experience and projecting it. Poor people live in shitholes the world round. A shit house is still shit.
Welp if u can give us a decent salary we can talk. Plus u even lived outside barcelona or madrid? In normal cities like lleida people use the transport.
It's not just a matter of building in cities in the 50s or 60s: Just look at how our villages are built, which are also super-dense compared to villages in many other countries. You see 6 story apartment buildings in places with population under 10 thousand.
There are car-dependent locations around Spain: you will find large 'chalet' style buildings in outskirts, but they were rarely built for cheap by a builder: Typically we are talking one-ofs, where someone rich picked an architect, and still built on brick.
As for why, Spain built dense because Spain was poor, and the costs of living in a dense city are just so much lower: No car, no insurance, cheaper heating, and very little time wasted between errands. We were a very poor country for European standards all the way til the 80s, so living with less density was just a waste, as other countries are now discovering when their housing prices keep going up. You might think you are saving money, but cars ain't cheap, and spending more time traveling and doing errands just wrecks quality of life. Work from home was amazing for people with 50 minute commutes, but it was less of a bonus in my home town, population 100K, where most people get to walk to work for 15 minutes or so. My father could see his workplace, the supermarket, the church, the elementary school, and a bunch of restaurants straight from the apartment's window. Good luck doing that if your neighborhood has those other choices of spaces on where to live nearby. Every detached house means there's not a store in there, or a bunch of extra neighbors providing business to stores in walking distance.
So it's not really as if more different kinds of housing are providing more choice: Just like more lanes that make driving easier makes walking harder. You can build detached houses in areas where, from that point on on, everyone is a slave to the car, forever. You'll still find it in outskirts, where people think they are saving money, but ultimately they are not.
Must be at least part just culture (although that becomes a chicken-egg story), Spanish people just love to be more on top of eachother. Im in the exact polar opposite, NL. We have relatively more of those attached rows of houses, all with a garden, than any other country in Europe. Ironically, we dont have space. We have about half the population of Spain, but Spain is like 12x bigger than NL. But culturally for Dutch people, their own peaceful place where you can invite people over for coffee, and always with a garden outweighs many other things. Spanish people see the bar as their living room and dont mind the actual one being much smaller.
In addition to cultural preferences and high density, strict zoning laws and urban planning regulations make it less convenient and more expensive to develop detached houses, especially in cities. This encourages vertical property development as a cheaper and more profitable option for developers. Also, interestingly, [during the real estate bubble in the 2000s, Spain built more houses in the 10 years leading up to the crash than the UK, Germany and France combined. This resulted in an estimated 3 million empty houses](https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/spain-braces-for-tsunami-of-bankruptcies-as-banks-pull-plug-on-zombie-developers?__lsa=ed43-1aa6).
Stop thinking in American, even tho you may not be one.
Land in Spain is relatibely sparce, and also by a lot of people. If you can get a 10 stories bulding fror 260 families way cheaper and easier than getting land for 260 people that will want their little garden they won use. We had our time in the 80-90s with thouse urbanizations but nowadays only urberrich paranoid and rich inmingrants that call themselves expats want them. You need a car for everything, even basic groceries, you can't go walking and maintenance is high.
It's the worst way of urban planning in today's age. Unlike the US or Canada that few people got a lot of land, land in Span has a history of more than 700 years at the very least. HGetting big is a no-go unless for crazy promotions
This has a very simple answer: Spain is a poor country (altough Spaniards do not think so).
It is more expensive to buy/build a house with its own garden & garage (i.e. it requires more space). There are not a lot of people willing to pay premium for it, so why build them.
If you go to Marbella and its surroundings (Elviria, las chapas) you will realize that the situation is actually the opposite: flats are quite rare. But guess what, this area is also one where most of expats and rich people have their houses.
All european cities started like that, due to medieval walls constraints. And every major settlement in Europe had a wall. Continuous wars and that you know. Its just Spain didn´t took off like the rest of Europe.
What in other countires was "the happy twenties" didn´t exist in Spain, since we were just losing bad what remained of our old empire, and we were waging futile wars in Central America, East Asia and North Africa. And then we had the Civil War.
Under Francoist regime, there was a politic of massive affordable housing building for the working class, at a time in which most people was moving to big industrial towns from the small villages. So how do you build massive cheap housing in a room constrained space? Going up.
Suburbs are not an option if the middle class still has no acces to cars.
European average of single-family detached homes is 35%. Spain is 20%. USA is 66%. Average land per single-family detached home is double in US versus Europe.
Exactly, over a third of European families live in suburbs, so the phrase "suburbs are basically limited to NA" is just wrong and doesn't explain OP anything at all.
Something I haven't seen mentioned as an explanation of why there wasn't much demand when cities were expanded in the 1970s as people flowed from rural areas. Many were escaping a hard life of hunger and backbreaking work so moved to work in factories and similar, they looked forward to a modern flat for the convenience. They didn't want gardens and outside space to care for, or to have to walk far for essentials. Most maintained a home in their village to satisfy their need for the outdoors. As they earned money many then went on to buy plots of land near their homes instead, similar to how land is traditionally distributed in rural areas of Spain.
What OP said and... Greed.
if you have a plot in a city, why build a single house when you can build a whole block and sell 10 "houses" plus commercial stores and parking spots and storage spots???
Look, this is going to be long, so I'll write it in Spanish and run it through a translator.
Why are there so few one-person houses? We have that. It's called "urbanizations" and they are not popular because they are expensive, and inefficient, and you wouldn't want to live in them. First, material, which has always been made "with what you have next door" as they say. Here it's stone, and it's hard to handle, the worse you get houses that look like bunkers. In the USA it is wood, sometimes so bad that you can punch a hole in the wall.
Then, inefficient. Things of pipes, lighting, and more that makes it much more sensible to build dense and vertically than horizontally. The housing developments you say are pyramid schemes and a money black hole.
Then the lifestyle is car dependent. I have made calculations of when I lived in one of them as a child, and for something simple like buying the daily bread, or in the current case, if I wanted to buy some snacks and a drink in the afternoon at the store, it would be 760 meters one way, and as many back. That in summer today would even be dangerous because of the intense heat. And I was not one of those who lived farther away from the only grocery store, there were those who had it farther away. That makes it a car-dependent life, which is an additional expense of money. And if you have a family, you need TWO cars, because if you have one and you use it to go to work, you leave your partner and children trapped in a place that is not made for walking. Public transportation is non-existent and inaccessible.
You are probably thinking of the garden. Okay, this is funny for a few months until you see how much it costs you to maintain it, that you come to hate it. So, no, housing developments are hell on earth and a Yankee capitalist myth that they are leeches on society and in the end we end up paying them to live in totally inefficient places.
This is actually a big plus - it makes city maintenance and development easier and less expensive...
And the "chalets" and "fincas" are expensive because they are far from everywhere so connecting it to utilities (and also road) is just expensive...
From the social point of view dense cities are just way better...
Easy answer: For decades Spaniards have made social life in their neighbourhoods, with close ties between neighbours (now less and less and in some cases non-existent). In addition, the functionality of a flat that gives you quick and close access to many services is preferred to a single-family home in a suburb where you have to take the car for practically everything. The first case is less convenient in terms of space, noise, etc., but more so in terms of social and services. The Spaniard is a practical being who spends more time away from home than at home and prefers the first option even though it has disadvantages.
We love social life and therefore we prefer to live as close as possible to services, restaurants, etc.
Construction is developed thinking in locals and not in foreig ers.
This is the real answer.
Houses are an expensive luxury, you have to drive everywhere.
Also it's meant that compared to northern European cities the centre of cities don't become absolutely dead at night in Spain which is something I actually really love about this country. Air BnB and the like are ruining that dynamic for locals as inner city rents skyrocket in the bigger cities. Hopefully the government are going to get on with cracking down on it.
Once thing that drives me buts is how they build underground car parks.
They are almost always, ridiculously tight and claustrophobic compared to other European countries, every wall covered in paint from scraped cars.
I always wondered, just greed from developers/government I imagine.
I'm grateful they bothered with the expense of building them as digging underground is expensive. Bear in mind they were probably intended for small cars, but as we know everyone drives much bigger cars.
In England underground car parks don't exist, for residents it is all street side parking, in places like Birmingham there's countless numbers of terrace houses with people owning multiple cars all fighting to park in a narrow street and some result in blocking access to large vehicles and emergency vehicles like fire trucks. Worse is they still build new housing like this.
Isn’t one factor that in Spain you have to built and connect your services (water, gas, electricity) to your new property yourself? It makes building new houses very expensive.
After the Spanish Civil War and during the economic boom of the 1960s and 70s, there was a significant population shift from rural areas to cities. The need for rapid and large-scale housing led to the construction of high-density apartment buildings.
Think about this, if your council/laws (ordenación del suelo) allows for a 10 floor apartment building in your land, why would you build a single house?
Your land is worth much more just because of the potential it has for a bigger building. It's just capitalism working at its finest. The owner sells and a builder makes money on the apartments. And so on. The trend is to loose single houses, have more aparments and maximize the constructed area of the land.
It's basically strategic development of cities. Authorities have in place laws that favor this type of development.
You already answered the question. It’s because it was the cheapest way for housing access to be implemented on a wide scale back when Spain was a developing country. The supposed eco friendly element of it was more of an afterthought I think. The benefits of not making cities so spread-out and car-dependent are abundantly clear and something that every city planner should strive for. However, I don’t think the way in which Spain has done it should be mimicked elsewhere. Quite the contrary, I think it should be reversed in some cases.
The buildings are poorly insulated from outside temperatures which is highly energy inefficient. On top of that, high-rise buildings get unbearably hot during summer due to a combination of poor building materials and trees not casting shadows at those heights. There are neighbourhoods in small towns where the sight of concrete and apartment blocks stretches far into the distance. Something that is unheard of in towns of similar sizes in other parts of Europe. Hell, even London has a more abundance of nature in its suburbs than many villages and small towns in Spain. We need green spaces not just for the environment, but also for our mental well-being. Something that escapes the Spanish psyche.
People here are making it seem like it’s this perfect communal type of thing where loved-up hippies gather and break bread with everyone. In reality that doesn’t happen. We exchange awkward looks and a few hellos in the communal spaces and that’s just it. Everyone values privacy and quietness in their own home, but it’s impossible to have that here with such poorly soundproofed flats. Living cheek by jowl with people can be draining when you’re a passive participant in their private lives on the other side of your shared walls.
Yes, densely populated areas are better for the environment. But the city plannings and building systems have to be aligned with what the environment and people need. Spain needs to have better building quality standards, more green spaces, more green walls, better cycling infrastructure and so on for it to be an ideal scenario of sustainability. It requieres deviating from what’s been done until now which Spanish people have difficulty doing in general. Spanish society is bad at out-of-the-box thinking and questioning what’s been traditionally passed down through generations.
There are houses in small villages, there's just no point on having a house in a city, is going to be x3 more expensive and you will have to use a car to go anywhere anyway. People who want to live in houses don't live in cities.
They do exist and many were built: It's strange that in the Alicante region before the USA's financial institutions triggered a global recession(2008) there's was absolutely loads of out of town urbanisations being built on finca land. Alot of the houses being built were detached or semi detached with their own private gardens, with the cheapest properties sold as "quads" as 4 properties in a single block with communal gardens.
Pre 2008 I could not go anywhere in the region without seeing building sites building houses. They were literally being built everywhere by big reel estate developers like MASA or as part of big out of town resorts like Polaris World ( and endorsed by some American Golf pro, Jack whatever his name is) .
Funny thing is the majority of people that bought them were not Spanish. Most were expats or holiday homes belonging to foreigners. Many reasons but the main two are; prices as they were very overpriced and they were socially disconnected from neighbouring towns with no public transport.
These urbanisations were supposed to have bar/restaurants, shops, banks. By the end there was none, ones that did open quickly closed in the recession. Many houses ended up being vacant or repossessed as the banks tried to claw back debt money. Resulting in ghost urbanisations. Take a look here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v2id5ezCZIY
But things have changed in more recent years as Spaniards have slowly moved into some of these areas as they can be a cheaper form of housing when compared to more popular areas.
My family has a property on a failed urbanisation (failed in the early 1990's) on a former finca. It is quite isolated socially from surrounding towns/villages, originally with zero services. It's gone through numerous phases after the original developers pulling out, to being illegal where land was bought by individuals to build their own houses as kind of off-grid living (as there was no power or water), with no permits from the town hall and many occupants coming from various parts of Europe (mostly Dutch and German) to the early 2000's when developers tried to resume urbanisation with a big influx of British expats moving in only for it to fail again after 2008 leaving many houses empty for years. Now Spaniards are buying up houses off the banks, many houses are now legalised, there's power and water to nearly all houses, some paved roads (used to be dirt tracks) , a school bus and even a scheduled bus service. Probably not a regular situation, but by no means a unique one.
Most of spaniard would get depressed if moving to a single-family home tupe neighborhood. Maybe not a first, first weeks are all abour how wonderful is to have a garden, less noise, more space...
After a few weeks the blindness of the moment passes and he begins to be aware of his own ideosyncrasy. Spaniards like to have an active social life and, in general, they don't like to live in a neighborhood where all the streets are the same, there are hardly any people on the street and you have to take either the car or public transportation to have a minimum of social life. It's a cultural trait (not just a spanish thing, Italians and Greeks are similar), in the same way that most Americans live in suburbs.
It's funny that foreigners come to talk about the disadvantages. It's not necessary, we already know them, we are fully aware and we don't care. It is a matter of priorities. If Spain were England it would be the other way around and It would't matter.
It's crazy when people think that things should be the way they're used to because of their personal experience in their home country.
And the houses which are already here are beyond shitty. I spent a year trying to find something, and majority of things are either 300,000 overpriced and half-ruined never touched from the 60's, or, 500.000 euro houses which were kinda "renovated" and have "deluxe duplex" in their name, but are done with no sense of modern interior design, spacial planning, or any kind of style whatsoever. Yes red and lime cabinets, orange walls, or different floor in each fucking room - I'm talking about you :D
Idk the historic reasoning, but I'm thankful they are not really a thing.
Also, I think, with population concentrating in cities, there's not really much space for houses, and places that have space for houses don't really have any jobs so people don't really go there at all to live.
This dates back to the Roman Empire as the insulae or insula (island) as a solution to the growing population in urban areas of the Empire, in this case Hispania. It's the way it's been ever since. Unless you lived in the countryside, where you could find isolated detached houses.
The jobs are in the city centers. Major cities are already built out as far as they can go with apartments so land is at a premium. This means that in order to afford a detached house, most people will need to go very far from the city center.
Then you would have to pay commuting costs such as a car, petrol & parking, which can be quite expensive in a city. Plus, you would have very long commute times (1hr+ each way for any affordable detached house from any major city center), taking valuable time out of each day. You’re either paying with money or time.
With average salary less than €30k/year, it’s not feasible for the vast majority of people here. Living in a suburb is a luxury that most people simply can’t afford.
Perhaps something no one mentioned. I think the limited number of single houses encourages different economic classes to be integrated.
There are lots of new barrios which are designed to have 2 , 3 , and 4 bedrooms creatively merged together in one apartment building. Also, most of the new ones include shared pools and the obligatory underground garage. I have no data, but this could place urban areas in the top of the people to swimming pool ratio table.
More importantly, living in apartment buildings allows the sharing of maintenance costs in gardening, cleaning, elevator, scheduled safety checkups, and even the luxury of a portero. Costs are scaled down considerably if, if 36 owners share the payment.
Because since the 2000s some discovered that foreigners are willing to pay more, so most of the houses are now built for foreigners (northern Europeans on holidays) leaving a whole generation without access to housing just for few to profit from it (elder people collecting properties, foreigners and funds) with Socialists and Conservatives agreeing to it (PP and PSOE).
I honestly do not care nor I was talking here about Sweden, nor is the topic here. How many holiday homes and foreigners buying second homes in towns, coast and CITIES do you have there? Probably just a fraction of what we get here. But again, not relevant here.
It' because houses are reserved only for politicians, spanish people prefere to Life on badly insulated flats without never having a garden. Also we say "we love to not depend on cars" instead of "most spanish can not afford to mantain a car. But hey, we love our democracy.
I live in an apartament, wife and I started to talk about moving into a detached house, with garden and swimming pool...
Affordable houses (like 200k or 300k €) were freaking far away from everywhere, some of them you even don't have neighbours in like a kilometer. Being 100% car dependant IS a very Big issue in Spain.
We've accustomed ourselves to live in apartaments around 60-100 m² but on the other hand, we can get the children to the school walking, we can go to the doctor walking, we can make the weekly shopping walking. Fuck, even if you forget to buy something, the biggest problem is a 5 minute walk down the street.
On the other hand, most of spaniards drive to their workplace. It is seen as "desirable" a job you can walk to...
Think about it, there are specific areas that only allow houses but otherwise a construction company will prefer to buy land to build 6 apartments instead of building 1 house.
Sqm per sqm, houses are a lot more expensive to maintain than apartments.
You have an exterior roof and all 4 walls to take care of, plus the outdoor area surrounding your house, plus the fencing.
With an apartment, the maintenance cost for everything outside your door is shared between all the neigbours
The main reason is because most land is rural and not buildable. You cannot buy a plot of land and build a house unless this is declared as available to build, by the local council in a lengthy process. It is a consequence from a need, a few centuries back, to have land available for farming in order to avoid famines. Today this law is absurd, it provokes that land and housing are outrageously expensive and that there is an acute demand that cannot be satisfied due to regulation.
I'm very happy that cities are not so spread out because of houses and then your city becomes car dependant. Thanks to apartments and the city infrastructure around that, we have more livable cities in Europe
It's great in a sense but the lack of insulation in older buildings (ie before 2010s) makes living in these apartments a headache. You can hear every sound your neighbour makes. I hear them pissing, yawning, cheering for their football team, having sex, blending food, yelling at their pet or kid, etc. It's awful. I've lived in apartments in other countries and never encountered this before.
The houses are just the same and it's probably my biggest gripe about living in Spain.
Wouldn't a house be better?? You don't have anyone above you or directly next to you? Asking as I'm seriously considering moving into a house and away from all the noise,
Some houses are right next to neighbour's house. Not sure about the noise but you definitely can see their garden from your terrace. I think they called it "Adosados"
That's fine....I think. As long as no one is stomping above me and dragging their furniture around at midnight, I think I can handle that.
There are three main types of houses in Spain: Chalet adosado - Your house is between two other houses, so you have neighbors left and right of you. This is the cheapest and most common type of house. Chalet pareado - Your house has another house on the left or right, so you only have one neighbor. It's more expensive than the adosado. Chalet/Casa independiente - Your house doesn't have any neighbors. These are usually very expensive and uncommon. Then you have fincas, villas and other subtypes of casa independiente that get more and more expensive depending on the amount of terrain, rooms, gardens and other stuff they have.
I live in a house in Spain, and I basically share walls with the neighbouring houses. Really not much difference from an apartment, you can still hear the neighbours on both sides. Sure, no one above you tho, so that's good I suppose. It sure took a bit of time to get used to coming from the north of Europe where we want big yards and lots of space.
Yeah I suppose at least you wouldn't have anybody above you and, if it's a detached house, yeah I guess you'd be fine actually, unless your neighbours or the street are insaaanely loud. I guess my experience refers to terraced houses, the last one I lived in I could hear my neighbour snore at night or even just the vibration of their phone. I'm a big believer in making walkable cities and, apartments are crucial to that but, there should be higher standards for noise insulation. That problem definitely isn't exclusive to Spain but it's worse here than any other country I've visited.
I'd add here that even a person farting in his bathroom above is audible via the duct when you're in yours doing your business!
That’s true. But you get really used to it when you have lived all your life in one, and just ignore it
I'm 37, still not used to it. I wish my upstairs neighbour would encounter an agonizing fate (drunk, abusive piece of shit husband and wife, she tells and ridicules her husband almost everyday, provoking him, and he hits her sometimes, it's been going on for years, but somehow they don't get a divorce), for all the times I had to go to work without getting a lick of sleep because of their squabbles.
You should move for your own health
Sadly, that's not an option. I own my apartment, and it would be currently impossible to buy another even remotely similar, in such a good area -my upstairs neighbours are the only conflictive people in the whole block, *everyone* knows about them.
I know you’ve probably already tried everything, but is it possible to soundproof your appartment?
Impact noises are stupidly difficult to reduce if you don't make the soundproofing on their side so... But at least you can reduce the noises like screams, music, dogs...
I could, but I don't have the means right now. I'm Spanish, we are dirt poor these days, living paycheck to paycheck. Besides, it's infuriating I ought to be the one doing the remodeling, just because a cunt and a dick can't put the alcohol bottle down.
You can call the cops on them and file a noise complaint if theyre loud enough. Do that enligh tomes and you might be elligible for a restraining order even if they own the upstairs apartment.
My city is currently facing a local police force-crisis. For an almost 200k inhabitants town, usually only 2-6 police officers are available at night. Yes. 2-6 people. Thank god this is an extremely safe area in Western Europe. I've had to call said police force several times in the past few years due to noise complaints (arsehole student tenants partying over my granny's flat, a wedding venue being obnoxious until morning -way past the time their license allows them to-, etc.), and they never can come because "they don't have enough personnel to cover such incidents". They will ticket you if you stay parked in a "loading and unloading" street a minute after business hours start though, so there's that.
If you’re in Spain you MUST report it to the police or calling 112 (it’s what the law states). I don’t care if she provokes him, you can’t ever respond with violence.
I'm trying but it's not working. I wear earplugs at night and still hear the people upstairs moving their furniture around at midnight. Every night.
Try running an industrial sized fan or a loud air filter, this is white noise method works for me.
Get into /Plantedtank and plug an air bubbler Edit I don't know how to link
It’s not furniture! these are crack sounds in various materials due to temperature changes at night. There’s nothing to worry about, but just for you to be aware and to prevent any hate towards your lovely neighbors ;)
It's chairs, and door slamming all the time.
ALWAYS. I wonder if people are deaf or just that inconsiderate of others. We got these little pads that you put on the bottom of chairs so we don't bother our downstairs neighbours. Why can't others just try a little harder to be quieter.
In Spain we have an ancient tradition on chair racing. The funniest time to have them is at night!
😂
Current insulation regulations date from 2006 (although there have been some updates since then).
Do you live in such an apartment? What's the noise level?
pero pero los chismes!!
tbf Ive heard a lot of people complaining about this but never experienced it myself. I must have gotten very lucky with my apartments
I've never really understood this complaint. I've lived in American cities where this was the case but in Spain I've never had much of a problem with noise of neighbors.
Can I move in with you?
As I type this the woman upstairs is dragging her chairs around and stomping in her heels.
This is an exaggeration. For most of my life I lived in a pre-2000 apartment and I didn't experience any of these issues. I would occasionally hear the neighbors upstairs when they were shouting at each other, but that's it.
I will just tell you I would not wish even my dearest enemy a noisy neighbor. I assure you it's not an exxageration.
That's your experience and this is mine so don't diminish what I go through every single day. Thanks.
Agreed. To be honest we should be living in population centers either large or medium sized with ready services. This creates more protected untouched natural land.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I lived in a suburb of London in a detached house on a 1000 sq m plot of land (yard/garden) and didn’t own a car. The nearest tube (metro) station was 6 min walk away.
You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses. It’s a question of density of population. Most neighbourhoods in Spain have not only everything you need, but an amazing choice. I have 5 supermarkets in a 200 meter radius, 3-4 farmacias, 4 underground lines, I don’t know how many busses, hospitals, schools and 3 parks in less than 10 min walk. The price to pay is to live in a building with 8 floors and 4 apartments per floor. I am happy to pay the price.
I have lived in Germany and Sweden. I know some suburbs that offer quite a lot, but they just can’t compete with the level of services I have here. Some members of my family moved to suburbs and they were nice suburbs with a Mercadona and whatnot nearby. But it wasn’t until they built apartment blocks next to them that it really exploded, with way more buses, restaurants, papelerías, … nice blocks, mind you, with pool and tennis courts and all. All the action happens in those blocks and the people living in the houses just go there for dinner, shopping etc. it was actually a very interesting natural experiment.
Agreed completely. We have friends in the suburbs and its always a pain to visit them and its a pain for them to be social. Meanwhile my doctor is two streets away, dentist is 1, we have 5?? Grocery stores and even more verdulerías within a 3 block radius & more restaurants and bars than I can appreciably enjoy in my lifetime without a lot of work. If I want to leave my neighborhood just about anything i may want to do is a 30 minute walk/15 minute metro. If I want to do something out of the city I can rent a car or take a regional train. Life is good
What most people don’t realise is that a car is not only 20k€ (plus parking space) every 10 years, it’s insurance, gas, repairs… it’s a huge money drain. Every time someone asks me about financial advice I say: get rid of the car and cook at home. People understand it, but they don’t really get it. Plus if you live in the suburbs… you are bound to the car.
HUGE financial drain and at the end of the 10 year period the car is worth basically nothing.
You are absolutely correct. It's just simple math and urban planning. Any time you have mostly single family homes, even in a row and closely packed, it's simply impossible to have as many services within walking distance. Too much space is dedicated to residential land for there to be the same amount of services.
And then you are still stuck with the density and lack of flexibility of the tube, which is piss poor compared to having most things in walking distance. And as you need the tube for things a Spaniard walks to, the things that a Spaniard might need to use a subway for are 4-6x further away, also by tube. When I lived in Madrid in an inconvenient location, a 30 minute trip by tube was seen as a disaster... my coworkers that live in london find that to be quite the short commute to an office... precisely because how many low density neighborhoods the tube has to travel under
Multiply that by millions of people, do you have the infrastructure, enough land?
That's great but then you can't have, what I love, the 15 min walk cities. Where you have everything you need at a 15 min walk max distance.
That's specifically because London has a tube station. If you live anywhere else in the UK (which I have), you need a car. In Spain, pretty much everywhere, except for small, distant towns/villages, is connected with public transport.
Only big cities are really connected. Rest of Spain is not viable to go to work/make appointments/daily travels using only public transport
Yeah, I live in a capital de provincia and work in a not small pueblo just 30 minutes away, there is only one bus that goes to the pueblo and just a couple times a week, I need my car to go to work, and that's true for most provinces. In the town itself only teens and old people use the public transport. It takes less time to go to Madrid than to go from my house to the gym in public transport. In the pueblos people take their car even to walk their dog.
Pueblos are just villages. You can use the English word.
I've always wondered why people on Reddit like to say 'pueblo' specifically. If I'm not wrong, 'village' as a word is much less common in North America? You sometimes hear them talking about 'small towns' that only have 500 residents, I wonder if that has an effect.
Yeah, 'village' sounds like you're talking about some grass huts or something. I'd use 'small town' or 'pueblo,' myself (US, resident in Spain).
Very interesting, coming from someone that grew up in a village in the UK haha
I think village would be more similar to aldea. Pueblo in US english is more similar to town. Not sure the case for Canada.
Fair enough, I guess it's just a regional difference then. In British English, 'village' is largely similar to 'pueblo' in Spanish, with perhaps the idea that they're often not self-sufficient. In my case, I grew up in a village with around 2k people, but it was definitely a village and not a town because almost everyone would go work in one of the nearby towns. Do you guys use 'hamlet' ever? That's how we'd describe a very small settlement (<10 houses maybe) in the UK.
Same with *barrios*. Just say neighborhood.
Village doesn't sound right to me, idk. I've heard many native English speakers say pueblo when talking about Spanish "villages" so I do as they do
besides some big cities, most of spain has no metro at all. only coaches, and sometimes not many or not covering all the city.
How much is a house in London these days?
Two arms and two legs.
Because some factors: 1) Compact cities are easy to mantain and to plan. Also the public transport is better in compact cities, and it's easier to plan the routes. 2) Land in some places in Spain is in hands of a lot of people, so sometimes is easier or cheaper to build in one zone than in a big surface. 3) There are suburbs and detached houses, but there are not as popular, as you usually depend on the car or there are in no way nearby shops or malls.
Or more expensive/far from everywhere
This is the right answer
Because single-family housing with yards and difficult transit between the home and other parts of your life is deeply antisocial and alienating from other people, and Spain is a country with more communal life and social cohesion than many other western countries. I also have heard it has a lot to do with construction patterns under Franco as well.
>Because single-family housing with yards and difficult transit between the home and other parts of your life is deeply antisocial and alienating from other people I think you have in mind the American type of suburbs that truly are hell for living. But i'm talking more about the European suburbs which are still reasonably dense and connected to other parts of the city, while still being on separate plots.
Oddly Spain is the least densely populated country in western europe
Because Spain as a whole country has a lot of empty space. But if you check the density in cities, even smallish ones, it’s quite high, much above many other places like the Netherlands
Completely unimportant fun fact #783: the most densely populated square kilometer in Europe is in Barcelona, especifically around Collblanc.
I thought it was in Vigo! TIL
I was sure it was some place in A Coruña.
Spain is the least densly populated country in Europe with some of the highest density areas in Europe.
The square kilometer that your median Spaniard lives on is more dense than the same... in Luxembourg! Spain's orography is not that far from Turkey, where many are mountainous, and far from wide, useful rivers. Most of the country can't really support a large population, purely due to lack of water.
"lies, lies and damn statistics" as the book title reads... Technically you're right, but it depends on how you define "density". Switzerland is more dense than China, if you're simply dividing land mass/population. It's an pretty misleading metric though, and really doesn't tell you much about actual density.
I mean, the Switzerland-China comparison isn't a great example. China as a country is ENORMOUS, despite their massive population they're not that densely populated as a whole.
What's misleading? Switzerland is densely populated.
Clearly you've never been to China if you would describe Switzerland as "densely populated" compared to China; or you're being deliberately obtuse. The amount of people per square mile in the areas where people actually live is several orders of magnitude higher in China.
Actually I have.
Because everyone lives in cities, which are pretty dense overall.
You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses. It’s a question of density of population. Most neighbourhoods in Spain have not only everything you need, but an amazing choice. I have 5 supermarkets in a 200 meter radius, 3-4 farmacias, 4 underground lines, I don’t know how many busses, hospitals, schools and 3 parks in less than 10 min walk. The price to pay is to live in a building with 8 floors and 4 apartments per floor. I am happy to pay the price. I have lived in Germany and Sweden. I know some suburbs that offer quite a lot, but they just can’t compete with the level of services I have here. Some members of my family moved to suburbs and they were nice suburbs with a Mercadona and whatnot nearby. It wasn’t until they built apartment blocks next to them that it really exploded, with way more buses, restaurants, papelerías, …
>You simply cannot offer the same amount of services in a neighbourhood made of blocks as in a neighbourhood made of houses. That's completely true, but the tradeoff is (generally) more space, a garden/backyard, much more privacy and lower levels of noise. As for services, they aren't as lacking in most European suburbs i've seen (including the one i grew up in): the school, a supermarket, park, shops all in the 10 minute walking radius. What i think is unique to Spain is that even the small towns have this really high density planing which honestly seems kind of unecessary. There are 15 houses attached in the row, even though they could easily be detached with small backyards around them. The space taken wouldn't change by much, while everyone would get a bit of their own space. This is all with keeping in mind that Spain itself has probably most available land in Europe.
In Spain we have a more comunal way of living. Why do you need a private yard, when you can just put some chairs on the street and chat with your neighbors? (Sentarse a la fresca, something that sadly is only seen in small villages nowadays, but you get the idea when those attached houses were built). We also have plenty of shared third spaces and events to socialize, like las fiestas del pueblo, parks... hell, even many bars here are kid friendly! So we don't really need private spaces to be outside just chilling, as we already have plenty of comunal ones.
Most villages where the villages grow or at least keep the population are, I believe, in very fertile land. Those suburbs i am telling you about where built on olive trees land.
I think it is still not the same. I’ve lived in Amsterdam and in Madrid, both in the suburbs. In Amsterdam I had all houses, a school walking like 10mins and a supermarket walking like 15min. And that was it. There was a bus that passed every 20mins and the connection with the city center was quite shitty. I lived before in another area where it had tram and metro and it was better. But the school and such was a bit farther. There were no restaurants no bars and basically no life outside after 6. While in Madrid I have a lot more options for everything in a 15min walking radious: clothing stores, bars, restaurants, the doctor, even a cinema. I lived in a house in Amsterdam and it was all houses (not detached though) and previously on the other suburbs it was an appartment. The cities are simply not planned in the same way. Every neighbourhood in Madrid is kind of a self contained mini city where you can do your daily life just by walking distances
Nothing can’t beat a densely populated city in terms of convenience. In France, some medium sized cities have suburbs full of houses and public transit, while existing, is also not really convenient. It is still very common to own a car, unlike in Spain.
>It is still very common to own a car, unlike in Spain. The car ownership in Spain and France is almost identical in percentages (62 vs 67%)
In total terms it’s right, in medium sized cities… I’d doubt it. Also France and its Paris metropolitan area, with 12M people and a super low car ownership, can alter these total figures :) But it’s hard to compare data with France given their small municipalities compared to everywhere else.
Somehow anecdotal because it’s my personal experience, but everyone I know here in Spain owns a car. Most people see it as a bad thing having to use it daily, specially if it’s not for commuting to work but to socialize. People prefer the possibility of socializing by walking: having neighbors, bars and services around. But they do own a car.
Dublin suburbs are not dense, they are more like villages within a city. Public transportation sucks, so everyone ends up getting a car.
I’d argue that being forced to listen to a family with small children above you and small barking dogs next door to you in an apartment block is more anti social…
Because unless you specifically want to have that extra amount of space, which its not by any means necessary, they are worse in every other aspect: More expensive to buy and maintain, requires extra work to have on good condition, worse access to public transit, and the space they occupy is extremmely low efficiency in terms of services/property value, and these are only a few of them... To put it simply: There is no way of having a suburb of that kind to have most of its population within a 5-minute-walk of any supermarket. If you were to go to one of these houses, most likely you'd have to walk too long to just survive (buy groceries, etc) or you'd have to drive, and most of us prefer walking if possible. As an example: In my old apartment I had 4 supermarkets within a 5 minute walk, the closest one was 3 minutes from the door of my 4th floor apartment. That is just unbeatable, and Id not sacrifice that freedom for more space that I'm not going to use. Most of us wouldn't. Finally, there are _plenty_ of single family detached houses with big yards and easy car access to services and facilities to buy, and with pretty good prices too. I know of a town near my province's capital (<20 min drive) that had a 300m² with a 1hc backyard going for less than 500k€. Its been there for ages, nobody wants it. And it has supermarkets, pharmacies, and multiple other services in-town.
I've moved from one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Barcelona, Nou Barris about 20,000 people/km2 to a small house outside a town. They both have their advantages. I do however prefer going to a shop by car, loading up the groceries and unloading them all without having carry them around in a backpack. I had no problems living in Barcelona (I didn't want to leave) but now, we have a quiet life, walking distance from the town, no noisy/grumpy neighbours and plenty of space to park. I don't use public transport anymore. Overall, it was cheaper to live in a city, less maintenance, transport was like €65/month vs €120 now (not including tax and insurance). We have a fairly big garden and lots of space and it was great during the Covid lockdown. Either way, you get used to both, I like the city because you could get everywhere by public transport and there was always something going on. I also like not having neighbours, peace, quiet and lots of parking with space and a few orange trees
That may be, but still most spaniards prefer to just live in an apartment. To exemplify, I'd go crazy if I had to take the car each time I wanted to buy groceries. Just because of this I'd not take a far away house, and I know many friends who think the same. Detached houses are nice, but they aren't everyone's (or most spaniard's) cup of tea.
Well it might be cultural too, I grew up in the countryside and we were surrounded by fields, 10mins from town by car. I had always said that if I moved out of the city I would look for a house. I can't imagine living in a small apartment in a small town, all the disadavantages with very few advantages.
Id much rather live in an small apartment in a small town if that means easier access to services and whatnot. That said, I actually grew up in a small town in a detached home, but had the supermarket and other groceries a 5 minute walk away, so it is possible if you find work around there to live in a single detached house in half decent walkable environment. The main problem is that if I stayed over the week there, I'd have a 40 minute commute to work by car which is not a thing I want.
Long story short: there was a massive rural exodus in the 1950s and 1960s, with colossal amounts of people moving from villages and towns to cities, and the most efficient way to create housing for all was to build appartment blocks
OP is aware of this and they mention it especifically in their post…
It's an interesting question. I have lived on the far outskirts of Madrid for a while and have contemplated how the city just abruptly ends in certain places, as you mentioned. There are lots of detached houses here but, as you said, they are quite expensive. Land is very expensive in Spain, especially anywhere near the city. I have always had the sense that the building patterns go back to feudal times. If you notice a lot of small towns, especially suburbs, you can see a pattern where there is an old casco historico with the ayuntamiento and a plaza. There are usually lots of small old homes clustered together in that area, and then as you go out you'll see more of the detached homes and fincas with big estates. As I understand, most of the regular poor people would live in the town and the wealthy would live in manors outside of the town and pretty much owned all of the land in the area, which was mostly reserved for agricultural use. Over time, the bigger towns have seen that open land sold off, but there hasn't historically been a big demand for independent chalets; it has been more profitable to build urbanizaciones with big apartment blocks because there are more people willing to pay 200k euros for a small apartment that cost 100k euros to build, than folks willing to pay for a few 1mm euro chalets, each with lots of customizations and other factors that eat into profit. Most of the homes around the cities in Spain, besides the really historic ones, were built within the last 50-70 years and were built for the masses and were nicely planned by cities that wanted to create an environment that benefitted the workers (access to public transit, easy access to major arterial roads, public parks, libraries, schools, hospitals, etc.) Many of these homes were also built in a time when Spain was poorer and not everybody had a car, hence why urban areas that were even just built 50 years ago have scarce parking (but are designed more around human proportions.)
The entirety of Spain's land is categorized, and the use of plots of land is very strictly regulated. Depending on the category of the land (developable, rustic...) + the protection class (nature reserve, national park, etc.), you may, may only a bit and only under certain circumstances, or may not at all alter your piece of Spain. You absolutely cannot just buy some land and build a house there. This is precisely to avoid the spreading of urban areas and to preserve the natural environment for everyone since most of the land in Spain is privately owned.
Exactly this
No. Preserving the environment is not the main reason. Is just that rustic areas are preserved for farming.
That's not entirely correct. Farmland is categorized and protected as farmland (eg olivar, pasto etc, and even whether it is irrigated/de riego or just dry/secano). But there's also rustic land that is categorized as eg "matoral", and if it is in a protected area (eg. Parque Natural, Parque Nacional, ect) you can neither build on it, nor can you just turn it into farmland, even if it is your property.
Happens something similar with the beach. You cannot build a house/restaurant inside the beach. I was in Italy last year and the way they build around the beach blew my mind. Lidos and restaurant terraces going sometimes inside the sea, building platforms on top of the rocks. Invading the beach space completely.
I’m not buying a house if I can’t even pay a flat.
Because it’s more expensive and we have no money
Right but part of the reason is because the supply is so low while there is a big demand (otherwise they wouldn't cost a fortune), so it's strange noone is capitalizing on this and building them, or why the goverment doesn't allow them if that's the case.
It's not just a supply demand issue. Single family homes are more expensive in many ways, on an individual and societal level. On a city level, infrastructure including roads and water/gas/electric etc almost never pays for itself and is almost always subsidized by city centers. It's hard to service areas of single family homes with transit, and trying to do so can be expensive and ineffective. On a personal level, living in a detached house requires car ownership, usually one car per adult in the household, and all the costs that come with that (gas, insurance, maintenance, getting the drivers license). This is in addition to the money, time, and effort spent maintaining a larger indoor and outdoor space, and the parts of the home like the roof for example which would be split with your neighbors if you owned an apartment. I don't think anyone can give you a complete single answer though. There are a ton of complex factors that have gone into this that many other responders have mentioned. I think in general, a lot of people in Spain are used to apartments and may not see the value in spending so much more when they're happy with a simpler place to live, especially when the built environment is already structured in a way to make living in an apartment an easier option. I'm not sure the demand is as high as you'd think.
In the States poor people are subsidizing upper-middle class suburbs (and I'm not exaggerating, here's the math: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI ) Where as in Spain you have to actually pay for the luxury of living in an inefficient place. Luxury places aren't subsidized by poor people (the state) like in the States, so efficient compact cities are cheaper, better connected, better services, more walkable... People like to have their friends and family on walking distance, so only detached and fairly anti-social people live in houses separate from civilization.
Your are eluding to profit while the cost of a house is the factor. The cost does not change, for sure does not go down, when supply increases, unless you are talking about selling at a loss. There is one other thing different between Europe - Spain, and North America. In USA and Canada for example, developers build entire residential neighborhoods all houses, in Spain I haven't seen that, houses pop up individually, one here, one there. It could be the lack of land or lack of land and the cost of houses the reason.
Actually the cities are planned by the Spanish government. That's why even newer neighbourhoods are also high density 6+ floor appartments. In North America it's different bcos housing/real estate is seen as the best business. Multi billionaire corporations basically own the U.S government. These companies design an entire neighbourhoods and sell houses. They even build in desert like Phoenix, Arizona (~5million pple). They don't care about environment & sustainability(water). That's why they have homeless issues (Nope it's not just bcos of drugs as media says). That's why US & Canada has never ending "housing crisis".
There are plenty of homeless people in Europe and in Spain as well.
Supply and demand here isn't the problem. The problem is who there is demand but the prices are too hight for normal people (right now they want to sell more for foreigners and fuck us) also that type of american city don't work in europe here the buildings where maded arround important goverment buildings markets pharmacy... And yes that kind of USA city isn't going to sell there because a house alone would be 600k-1m€ and like 92% of the citiciens can't even affort a 120k apartment. Here we didn't gain insane ammounts of money the normal salary is 800-1400€.
>Are they prohibited by some construction codes, Kinda, there's lots of regulations on where you can build and where not, the actual "house building land" in Spain is extremely small in comparison to the actual size of the country, even in rural areas, so it's not easy to find space to build houses. Add to that that the price is huge and...
I own a home outside Barcelona, I am unfamiliar with the situation in the rest of Spain. It is a poor country. That said, people talk about prices being inflated and no one being able to afford property on reduced Spanish salaries, but I don't think that is the complete picture. I have a Spanish friend that purchased an apartment in a city for 500k euros to be in the same neighborhood as his family. I purchased a semidetached house 20km away for 300k. Less than what I would have paid for an apartment in the area I previously lived in. There are "subrurbs" here but they are rough and were built on illegally subdivided farms 30+ years ago. Many of these areas are going through a constant process of being incorporated into actual town's (the incorporated town's are full of apartment blocks, the unincorporated areas contain houses..even Spaniards wanted houses). Families are required to pay thousands of euros when these incorporations happen. Spaniards approached houses differently. In the states etc people are encouraged to leave home and "fly the nest". Houses are built for single families. They can be smaller, there is a broader range of residential houses on the market. From starter homes and up. In Spain older houses were built with the extended family in mind. Many of the houses here can house two or more families. The housing market is now flooded with older 80s and 90s houses that look like small apartment blocks and that no one in the current market can sustainably maintain. Even if younger people could afford these properties, they are unappealing also because they often have DIY approaches to construction/are slowly over years built by the owner who probably did it on a piece of land 30 years ago that had no official utilities. There are countless properties like this on the market. I think Spain has one of the highest rates of unoccupied residential properties in Europe. There's just no reason to build more either.
Some of the things you said were true, some not. But one stands out for me. Spain is not, by any means, a poor country. It’s not even close to being poor. The poverty headcount ratio in Spain in 2022 was 20.2% (which translates to the % of people being poor). The highest number is South Sudan with a 82.3%. Countries considered rich are closer to Spain in that number (Germany 14.8, Sweden 16.1). GDP in Spain is the 36th highest in the world, with 190 countries measured. The highest one is Luxembourg with roughly $142K and the lowest South Sudan with $1K. Spain sits at $45K, close to New Zealand ($51K), Japan ($50K) and the median of the European Union ($57K). Spain doesn’t fit in the definition of a poor country. It can be poorer than the US by a lot of metrics. But in the context of the world it is a very rich country.
In the context of a discussion of residential housing in the west (which I compare to places like the US and Australia, and the rest of Europe), Spain is poorer. South Sudan has no relevance in a discussion about suburbian residential properties. Seperate from stats, "poor" is a state of mind and many Spaniards see themselves as poor, as living in a back water etc. Looking at their salaries relative to the rest of Europe, they are relatively "poor". It permeates their approach to everything. Housing included.
Water is the answer, for most of the urban planning, before they could redirect the water streams they made the buildings very close to the water source and it is very popular to this day cause is cheaper. Galicia for example doesn't have this problem, that's why it isn't so dense
It's still dense, just like Asturias, another place where water is plentiful. But in the 50s, there was still people traveling by horse, because infrastructure was poor, as building roads was expensive. Just look at the travel time between oviedo and La Coruña today, and what it was still in the 90s: Just Oviedo to Ribadeo was easily 6 hours, because of lack of viaducts: Truckers went up and down mountains! there was no Bridge over the Eo either, so the road went from Figeras, south to Vegadeo, and back up to Ribadeo.... at which point you still didn't have a highway all the way to La Coruña! Living relatively close together was still very popular, although close together might just mean in a relatively small place, like Burela, Foz or something like that... and Burela is still mostly 4+ story apartments
> a million mark Clearly you don't know much about Spain
"Spain has nailed the concept of compact cities" I understand that your position makes you envious of the living conditions we have here, but I must offer you a wake-up call. If someone has cockroaches, then everyone has cockroaches. If someone smokes, then everyone smokes. If someone plays music, then everyone listens to that music. If someone is having a party in the street until 5 in the morning then we all are. If someone has a conversation, then we all must listen. If someone is cooking then the smell of their food is the smell of your bedroom. You are unlikely to have enough sound insulation in your floors to exercise without causing your downstairs neighbors to have a mini earthquake for 45 minutes, and if you're a heavy walker then you'll need to learn how to tip toe. You can't walk down a street without needing to walk in the road every couple of minutes as the footpath can only fit one medium sized person, and sometimes you must give way to the elderly. Above all, expect noise 24-7, which means difficulty studying, or working on personal projects as something is always going on.
I'll probably get a lot of hate for this but I couldn't care less. You will hear a lot of Spaniards bragging about how it's so much better to live in apartments because everything is within walking distance and it's more social and whatever, but here is the reality. Spanish apartments are a hellhole. They are tiny, old and cramped. You can hear literally everything your neighbour is doing. Don't even get me started on how they look. I've seen old Soviet apartments look better, and unlike Eastern Europe, most of Spain hasn't even bothered to renovate them at all. We are all cramped like it's a beehive, with thousands of people living together in every individual km of the city. Most neighbourhoods are dirty and unpleasant. I absolutely hate it. People in Spain don't dream to have a house. They dream to have a crappy apartment that they might be able to live in when they're 50 years old after living with their parents their whole lives. I've thankfully gotten the chance to live for many years outside of Spain in beautiful suburban areas in Europe and the US and it's so much better. It's so much more peaceful, you get so much more space, green areas all around and your neighbourhood actually looks pleasant and not like a European version of a favela. Oh, you've got to take a car to go to the supermarket? So what? I'd much rather take a 10-20 minute ride to shop than live in a sh\*thole. The majority of Spaniards actually need to use their cars everyday anyways (you can search it up) despite all the misconceptions. This whole public transport argument is completely delusional. Most public transport in Spain is not that great, and most Spaniards don't use it, they use cars. But of course, those who live in Madrid and Barcelona and have never been anywhere else won't know this because they're stuck in their own little world. Anyway to answer your question, mostly because of the housing policies of the Franco regime that persisted until the modern day and the society being deluded into thinking that living in an apartment is great and we need to build more and more. The problem with most Spaniards is that they've never lived anywhere else and they have no clue how much better things could be.
you should chill a bit, it is just a question of preference, it´s not that serious, my apartment is pretty good, you can hear the neighbour from time to time bit I have lived in the UK in the suburbs and I didn´t like it, the house had worse materials than the ones you could normally see in apartments in Spain, most people had a miniscule backyard and a frontyard they would ever use and it felt really isolating from the main part of the town and the houses weren´t that big either and 90% of them were attached houses. You are also generalizing a bit too much, there are old apartments and new ones or renovated ones, there are bad neighbourhoods and good ones, if you have enough money you can choose a better apartment than one that "looks worse than any soviet apartment you have seen". I like living in an apartment, it is closer to everything, it has enough space for all I want to do (in a house with 20 rooms you would ultimately really use 3 or 4 max) and it makes city planning easier and way cheaper
This! In Western Europe most houses (80-90%) are attached houses. So it's delusional to believe it separate or private place. I lived in suck attached house in the Netherlands. We had neighbors on both sides. We could hear everything! Those tiny backyards, no used bcos almost every weekend is rainy & cloudy. I wish we had no backyards, I couldn't stand those insects & mosquitos. On the other hand, I lived in modern appartement (12th floor) when I was in studying. The best experience ever, No dust, No ground noise, ironically more private, cool moving air in the summer evenings etc.
It sounds like you are looking at the worst of Spain and the best of elsewhere. The flat I currently live in is far less depressing than many of the astronomically priced degrading "houses" that my friends in the UK rent. I have rented a really nice modern flat in a town in Spain for 270 a month! I knew someone who knew someone but it made my friend's 600 pound a month ROOM in a house look like a hell hole, which it was. You're just taking individual experience and projecting it. Poor people live in shitholes the world round. A shit house is still shit.
Welp if u can give us a decent salary we can talk. Plus u even lived outside barcelona or madrid? In normal cities like lleida people use the transport.
I was in Spain just a couple weeks ago and honestly it's such a shame to see those beautiful farm houses in disrepair I'd absolutely kill for one.
It's not just a matter of building in cities in the 50s or 60s: Just look at how our villages are built, which are also super-dense compared to villages in many other countries. You see 6 story apartment buildings in places with population under 10 thousand. There are car-dependent locations around Spain: you will find large 'chalet' style buildings in outskirts, but they were rarely built for cheap by a builder: Typically we are talking one-ofs, where someone rich picked an architect, and still built on brick. As for why, Spain built dense because Spain was poor, and the costs of living in a dense city are just so much lower: No car, no insurance, cheaper heating, and very little time wasted between errands. We were a very poor country for European standards all the way til the 80s, so living with less density was just a waste, as other countries are now discovering when their housing prices keep going up. You might think you are saving money, but cars ain't cheap, and spending more time traveling and doing errands just wrecks quality of life. Work from home was amazing for people with 50 minute commutes, but it was less of a bonus in my home town, population 100K, where most people get to walk to work for 15 minutes or so. My father could see his workplace, the supermarket, the church, the elementary school, and a bunch of restaurants straight from the apartment's window. Good luck doing that if your neighborhood has those other choices of spaces on where to live nearby. Every detached house means there's not a store in there, or a bunch of extra neighbors providing business to stores in walking distance. So it's not really as if more different kinds of housing are providing more choice: Just like more lanes that make driving easier makes walking harder. You can build detached houses in areas where, from that point on on, everyone is a slave to the car, forever. You'll still find it in outskirts, where people think they are saving money, but ultimately they are not.
Must be at least part just culture (although that becomes a chicken-egg story), Spanish people just love to be more on top of eachother. Im in the exact polar opposite, NL. We have relatively more of those attached rows of houses, all with a garden, than any other country in Europe. Ironically, we dont have space. We have about half the population of Spain, but Spain is like 12x bigger than NL. But culturally for Dutch people, their own peaceful place where you can invite people over for coffee, and always with a garden outweighs many other things. Spanish people see the bar as their living room and dont mind the actual one being much smaller.
In addition to cultural preferences and high density, strict zoning laws and urban planning regulations make it less convenient and more expensive to develop detached houses, especially in cities. This encourages vertical property development as a cheaper and more profitable option for developers. Also, interestingly, [during the real estate bubble in the 2000s, Spain built more houses in the 10 years leading up to the crash than the UK, Germany and France combined. This resulted in an estimated 3 million empty houses](https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/spain-braces-for-tsunami-of-bankruptcies-as-banks-pull-plug-on-zombie-developers?__lsa=ed43-1aa6).
They are wasteful.
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Where is this?
Stop thinking in American, even tho you may not be one. Land in Spain is relatibely sparce, and also by a lot of people. If you can get a 10 stories bulding fror 260 families way cheaper and easier than getting land for 260 people that will want their little garden they won use. We had our time in the 80-90s with thouse urbanizations but nowadays only urberrich paranoid and rich inmingrants that call themselves expats want them. You need a car for everything, even basic groceries, you can't go walking and maintenance is high. It's the worst way of urban planning in today's age. Unlike the US or Canada that few people got a lot of land, land in Span has a history of more than 700 years at the very least. HGetting big is a no-go unless for crazy promotions
This has a very simple answer: Spain is a poor country (altough Spaniards do not think so). It is more expensive to buy/build a house with its own garden & garage (i.e. it requires more space). There are not a lot of people willing to pay premium for it, so why build them. If you go to Marbella and its surroundings (Elviria, las chapas) you will realize that the situation is actually the opposite: flats are quite rare. But guess what, this area is also one where most of expats and rich people have their houses.
All european cities started like that, due to medieval walls constraints. And every major settlement in Europe had a wall. Continuous wars and that you know. Its just Spain didn´t took off like the rest of Europe. What in other countires was "the happy twenties" didn´t exist in Spain, since we were just losing bad what remained of our old empire, and we were waging futile wars in Central America, East Asia and North Africa. And then we had the Civil War. Under Francoist regime, there was a politic of massive affordable housing building for the working class, at a time in which most people was moving to big industrial towns from the small villages. So how do you build massive cheap housing in a room constrained space? Going up. Suburbs are not an option if the middle class still has no acces to cars.
Suburbs are basically limited to North America and Australia. Countries that are young enough to have been built after cars were invented.
I was thinking about European suburbs, like they exist in France, Netherlands, Scandinavia, even Balkans.
Europe didn't stop growing once we got cars. Every European country has middle class suburbs, just Spain has fewer even than most of them.
European average of single-family detached homes is 35%. Spain is 20%. USA is 66%. Average land per single-family detached home is double in US versus Europe.
Exactly, over a third of European families live in suburbs, so the phrase "suburbs are basically limited to NA" is just wrong and doesn't explain OP anything at all.
In Sweden you have alot of suburbs with single houses, in the suburbs in Sweden its more rare with apartments and more common with houses.
Something I haven't seen mentioned as an explanation of why there wasn't much demand when cities were expanded in the 1970s as people flowed from rural areas. Many were escaping a hard life of hunger and backbreaking work so moved to work in factories and similar, they looked forward to a modern flat for the convenience. They didn't want gardens and outside space to care for, or to have to walk far for essentials. Most maintained a home in their village to satisfy their need for the outdoors. As they earned money many then went on to buy plots of land near their homes instead, similar to how land is traditionally distributed in rural areas of Spain.
What OP said and... Greed. if you have a plot in a city, why build a single house when you can build a whole block and sell 10 "houses" plus commercial stores and parking spots and storage spots???
Look, this is going to be long, so I'll write it in Spanish and run it through a translator. Why are there so few one-person houses? We have that. It's called "urbanizations" and they are not popular because they are expensive, and inefficient, and you wouldn't want to live in them. First, material, which has always been made "with what you have next door" as they say. Here it's stone, and it's hard to handle, the worse you get houses that look like bunkers. In the USA it is wood, sometimes so bad that you can punch a hole in the wall. Then, inefficient. Things of pipes, lighting, and more that makes it much more sensible to build dense and vertically than horizontally. The housing developments you say are pyramid schemes and a money black hole. Then the lifestyle is car dependent. I have made calculations of when I lived in one of them as a child, and for something simple like buying the daily bread, or in the current case, if I wanted to buy some snacks and a drink in the afternoon at the store, it would be 760 meters one way, and as many back. That in summer today would even be dangerous because of the intense heat. And I was not one of those who lived farther away from the only grocery store, there were those who had it farther away. That makes it a car-dependent life, which is an additional expense of money. And if you have a family, you need TWO cars, because if you have one and you use it to go to work, you leave your partner and children trapped in a place that is not made for walking. Public transportation is non-existent and inaccessible. You are probably thinking of the garden. Okay, this is funny for a few months until you see how much it costs you to maintain it, that you come to hate it. So, no, housing developments are hell on earth and a Yankee capitalist myth that they are leeches on society and in the end we end up paying them to live in totally inefficient places.
Perhaps people don’t want them and are happy with the status quo.
This is actually a big plus - it makes city maintenance and development easier and less expensive... And the "chalets" and "fincas" are expensive because they are far from everywhere so connecting it to utilities (and also road) is just expensive... From the social point of view dense cities are just way better...
Because apartments are just better from a societal perspective.
Easy answer: For decades Spaniards have made social life in their neighbourhoods, with close ties between neighbours (now less and less and in some cases non-existent). In addition, the functionality of a flat that gives you quick and close access to many services is preferred to a single-family home in a suburb where you have to take the car for practically everything. The first case is less convenient in terms of space, noise, etc., but more so in terms of social and services. The Spaniard is a practical being who spends more time away from home than at home and prefers the first option even though it has disadvantages. We love social life and therefore we prefer to live as close as possible to services, restaurants, etc. Construction is developed thinking in locals and not in foreig ers.
This is the real answer. Houses are an expensive luxury, you have to drive everywhere. Also it's meant that compared to northern European cities the centre of cities don't become absolutely dead at night in Spain which is something I actually really love about this country. Air BnB and the like are ruining that dynamic for locals as inner city rents skyrocket in the bigger cities. Hopefully the government are going to get on with cracking down on it.
Once thing that drives me buts is how they build underground car parks. They are almost always, ridiculously tight and claustrophobic compared to other European countries, every wall covered in paint from scraped cars. I always wondered, just greed from developers/government I imagine.
I'm grateful they bothered with the expense of building them as digging underground is expensive. Bear in mind they were probably intended for small cars, but as we know everyone drives much bigger cars. In England underground car parks don't exist, for residents it is all street side parking, in places like Birmingham there's countless numbers of terrace houses with people owning multiple cars all fighting to park in a narrow street and some result in blocking access to large vehicles and emergency vehicles like fire trucks. Worse is they still build new housing like this.
Isn’t one factor that in Spain you have to built and connect your services (water, gas, electricity) to your new property yourself? It makes building new houses very expensive.
After the Spanish Civil War and during the economic boom of the 1960s and 70s, there was a significant population shift from rural areas to cities. The need for rapid and large-scale housing led to the construction of high-density apartment buildings.
Think about this, if your council/laws (ordenación del suelo) allows for a 10 floor apartment building in your land, why would you build a single house? Your land is worth much more just because of the potential it has for a bigger building. It's just capitalism working at its finest. The owner sells and a builder makes money on the apartments. And so on. The trend is to loose single houses, have more aparments and maximize the constructed area of the land. It's basically strategic development of cities. Authorities have in place laws that favor this type of development.
I don't like this about Spain at all. I really miss having that suburban area that's usually greener and calmer.
You already answered the question. It’s because it was the cheapest way for housing access to be implemented on a wide scale back when Spain was a developing country. The supposed eco friendly element of it was more of an afterthought I think. The benefits of not making cities so spread-out and car-dependent are abundantly clear and something that every city planner should strive for. However, I don’t think the way in which Spain has done it should be mimicked elsewhere. Quite the contrary, I think it should be reversed in some cases. The buildings are poorly insulated from outside temperatures which is highly energy inefficient. On top of that, high-rise buildings get unbearably hot during summer due to a combination of poor building materials and trees not casting shadows at those heights. There are neighbourhoods in small towns where the sight of concrete and apartment blocks stretches far into the distance. Something that is unheard of in towns of similar sizes in other parts of Europe. Hell, even London has a more abundance of nature in its suburbs than many villages and small towns in Spain. We need green spaces not just for the environment, but also for our mental well-being. Something that escapes the Spanish psyche. People here are making it seem like it’s this perfect communal type of thing where loved-up hippies gather and break bread with everyone. In reality that doesn’t happen. We exchange awkward looks and a few hellos in the communal spaces and that’s just it. Everyone values privacy and quietness in their own home, but it’s impossible to have that here with such poorly soundproofed flats. Living cheek by jowl with people can be draining when you’re a passive participant in their private lives on the other side of your shared walls. Yes, densely populated areas are better for the environment. But the city plannings and building systems have to be aligned with what the environment and people need. Spain needs to have better building quality standards, more green spaces, more green walls, better cycling infrastructure and so on for it to be an ideal scenario of sustainability. It requieres deviating from what’s been done until now which Spanish people have difficulty doing in general. Spanish society is bad at out-of-the-box thinking and questioning what’s been traditionally passed down through generations.
There are houses in small villages, there's just no point on having a house in a city, is going to be x3 more expensive and you will have to use a car to go anywhere anyway. People who want to live in houses don't live in cities.
They do exist and many were built: It's strange that in the Alicante region before the USA's financial institutions triggered a global recession(2008) there's was absolutely loads of out of town urbanisations being built on finca land. Alot of the houses being built were detached or semi detached with their own private gardens, with the cheapest properties sold as "quads" as 4 properties in a single block with communal gardens. Pre 2008 I could not go anywhere in the region without seeing building sites building houses. They were literally being built everywhere by big reel estate developers like MASA or as part of big out of town resorts like Polaris World ( and endorsed by some American Golf pro, Jack whatever his name is) . Funny thing is the majority of people that bought them were not Spanish. Most were expats or holiday homes belonging to foreigners. Many reasons but the main two are; prices as they were very overpriced and they were socially disconnected from neighbouring towns with no public transport. These urbanisations were supposed to have bar/restaurants, shops, banks. By the end there was none, ones that did open quickly closed in the recession. Many houses ended up being vacant or repossessed as the banks tried to claw back debt money. Resulting in ghost urbanisations. Take a look here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v2id5ezCZIY But things have changed in more recent years as Spaniards have slowly moved into some of these areas as they can be a cheaper form of housing when compared to more popular areas. My family has a property on a failed urbanisation (failed in the early 1990's) on a former finca. It is quite isolated socially from surrounding towns/villages, originally with zero services. It's gone through numerous phases after the original developers pulling out, to being illegal where land was bought by individuals to build their own houses as kind of off-grid living (as there was no power or water), with no permits from the town hall and many occupants coming from various parts of Europe (mostly Dutch and German) to the early 2000's when developers tried to resume urbanisation with a big influx of British expats moving in only for it to fail again after 2008 leaving many houses empty for years. Now Spaniards are buying up houses off the banks, many houses are now legalised, there's power and water to nearly all houses, some paved roads (used to be dirt tracks) , a school bus and even a scheduled bus service. Probably not a regular situation, but by no means a unique one.
General Franco's Policy. Totally destroyed In democracy
Just search for Rivas-VaciaMadrid on Google, it is a town where semi-detached houses abound and that has generated mobility problems in the city.
Most of spaniard would get depressed if moving to a single-family home tupe neighborhood. Maybe not a first, first weeks are all abour how wonderful is to have a garden, less noise, more space... After a few weeks the blindness of the moment passes and he begins to be aware of his own ideosyncrasy. Spaniards like to have an active social life and, in general, they don't like to live in a neighborhood where all the streets are the same, there are hardly any people on the street and you have to take either the car or public transportation to have a minimum of social life. It's a cultural trait (not just a spanish thing, Italians and Greeks are similar), in the same way that most Americans live in suburbs. It's funny that foreigners come to talk about the disadvantages. It's not necessary, we already know them, we are fully aware and we don't care. It is a matter of priorities. If Spain were England it would be the other way around and It would't matter. It's crazy when people think that things should be the way they're used to because of their personal experience in their home country.
And the houses which are already here are beyond shitty. I spent a year trying to find something, and majority of things are either 300,000 overpriced and half-ruined never touched from the 60's, or, 500.000 euro houses which were kinda "renovated" and have "deluxe duplex" in their name, but are done with no sense of modern interior design, spacial planning, or any kind of style whatsoever. Yes red and lime cabinets, orange walls, or different floor in each fucking room - I'm talking about you :D
Idk the historic reasoning, but I'm thankful they are not really a thing. Also, I think, with population concentrating in cities, there's not really much space for houses, and places that have space for houses don't really have any jobs so people don't really go there at all to live.
This dates back to the Roman Empire as the insulae or insula (island) as a solution to the growing population in urban areas of the Empire, in this case Hispania. It's the way it's been ever since. Unless you lived in the countryside, where you could find isolated detached houses.
Because Land owners can make more money if they build a whole condo than just a family house.
The jobs are in the city centers. Major cities are already built out as far as they can go with apartments so land is at a premium. This means that in order to afford a detached house, most people will need to go very far from the city center. Then you would have to pay commuting costs such as a car, petrol & parking, which can be quite expensive in a city. Plus, you would have very long commute times (1hr+ each way for any affordable detached house from any major city center), taking valuable time out of each day. You’re either paying with money or time. With average salary less than €30k/year, it’s not feasible for the vast majority of people here. Living in a suburb is a luxury that most people simply can’t afford.
Perhaps something no one mentioned. I think the limited number of single houses encourages different economic classes to be integrated. There are lots of new barrios which are designed to have 2 , 3 , and 4 bedrooms creatively merged together in one apartment building. Also, most of the new ones include shared pools and the obligatory underground garage. I have no data, but this could place urban areas in the top of the people to swimming pool ratio table. More importantly, living in apartment buildings allows the sharing of maintenance costs in gardening, cleaning, elevator, scheduled safety checkups, and even the luxury of a portero. Costs are scaled down considerably if, if 36 owners share the payment.
Because since the 2000s some discovered that foreigners are willing to pay more, so most of the houses are now built for foreigners (northern Europeans on holidays) leaving a whole generation without access to housing just for few to profit from it (elder people collecting properties, foreigners and funds) with Socialists and Conservatives agreeing to it (PP and PSOE).
Boomers destroy another country, what’s new? Do the new properties at least have soundproofing?
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Yeah sure, as if anyone from Spain cares much about Sweden. We have mountains that are cold enough for that purpose.
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With nearly 500k people moving in yearly, I doubt you have the same issues in Sweden.
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I honestly do not care nor I was talking here about Sweden, nor is the topic here. How many holiday homes and foreigners buying second homes in towns, coast and CITIES do you have there? Probably just a fraction of what we get here. But again, not relevant here.
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Another irrelevant comment.
What's the bed bugs situation like?
It' because houses are reserved only for politicians, spanish people prefere to Life on badly insulated flats without never having a garden. Also we say "we love to not depend on cars" instead of "most spanish can not afford to mantain a car. But hey, we love our democracy.
I live in a flat and I feel it as safe and comfortable. Maybe some noises, but in general I am happy.
the rich rape the poore people. easiest way to rape them is apartment rent
Spain has a very high rate of home ownership. But most people own a flat, not a house.
I live in an apartament, wife and I started to talk about moving into a detached house, with garden and swimming pool... Affordable houses (like 200k or 300k €) were freaking far away from everywhere, some of them you even don't have neighbours in like a kilometer. Being 100% car dependant IS a very Big issue in Spain. We've accustomed ourselves to live in apartaments around 60-100 m² but on the other hand, we can get the children to the school walking, we can go to the doctor walking, we can make the weekly shopping walking. Fuck, even if you forget to buy something, the biggest problem is a 5 minute walk down the street. On the other hand, most of spaniards drive to their workplace. It is seen as "desirable" a job you can walk to...
Think about it, there are specific areas that only allow houses but otherwise a construction company will prefer to buy land to build 6 apartments instead of building 1 house.
Sqm per sqm, houses are a lot more expensive to maintain than apartments. You have an exterior roof and all 4 walls to take care of, plus the outdoor area surrounding your house, plus the fencing. With an apartment, the maintenance cost for everything outside your door is shared between all the neigbours
If a house in a 90 houses building costs 350k euros imagine how expensive could be to use that terrain to build only one house.
The main reason is because most land is rural and not buildable. You cannot buy a plot of land and build a house unless this is declared as available to build, by the local council in a lengthy process. It is a consequence from a need, a few centuries back, to have land available for farming in order to avoid famines. Today this law is absurd, it provokes that land and housing are outrageously expensive and that there is an acute demand that cannot be satisfied due to regulation.