Once mocked as ghost towns born from the ruins of Spain’s 2008 property crash, Seseña and other half-built suburban developments are now experiencing a revival, according to a recent piece by Reuters. Driven by the country’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, these long-overlooked urbanisations are being rediscovered by middle-class families priced out of Madrid’s overheated markets.
From ghost town to waiting list
Two minutes after real estate agent Segis Gómez posted a new listing in Seseña—a vast development 40km south of Madrid once plagued by empty concrete shells and abandoned cranes—her phone rang. And it hasn’t stopped ringing since. She now has a waiting list of 70 prospective tenants for each available home.
After more than a decade of stagnation and squatting, cranes are once again on the skyline, and construction crews are back at work. Housing prices, which once plummeted to less than half their original value, have now fully recovered, Gómez says.
“People are choosing this place because they can afford it,” explains Néstor Delgado, a 34-year-old construction worker who moved with his family from Carabanchel in 2021. The commute is brutal—he rises before 5 am to catch a 6:30 bus—but the savings are worth it. He recently bought a home for €240,000.
A crisis of supply, not demand
Seseña’s comeback highlights the greater mismatch in Spain’s real estate market: demand is booming, but supply is stagnant.
In 2024, Madrid’s population swelled by 140,000 people—but only 20,000 housing permits were issued. Years of sluggish construction, restrictive urban planning laws, and the rise of short-term rentals have squeezed supply across the board.
Carles Vergara, a real estate professor at Madrid’s IESE Business School, summed it up: “We can’t adapt supply to demand quickly enough—so prices go up, or people compromise and move further out.”
El Pocero’s legacy reborn
Seseña owes much of its notoriety to its original developer, Francisco Hernando—better known as “El Pocero” or “Mr. Drains” in English.
His ambitious early-2000s dream was to build 13,000 affordable flats with pools and green spaces in the heart of Don Quixote country. But Hernando skipped a few essentials—like securing a water supply and public transport—and the scheme famously collapsed after the Spanish real estate bubble burst with only 5,000 units completed. For years after the crash the project was largely written off as a cautionary tale of speculative excess, though some sort of a revival had begun before El Pocero’s death during the pandemic in 2020. El Porcero himself abandoned Seseña in 2015 to go and build homes in Equatorial Guinea.
But today, Seseña is bustling. With new schools, shops, cafés, gyms, and pharmacies in operation, life is returning. Developer Impact Homes is building 156 new apartments, another development has already pre-sold nearly half of its units, and the mayor Jaime de Hita says the town is “at 100% occupancy.”
And the ambitions don’t stop there. De Hita has announced plans for a €2.3 billion logistics park called “Parquijote” that would bring 2,200 new homes and a stream of local jobs.
“We’ve learned from the past,” he says. “This time, we aim to grow smart.”
The return of Spain’s ghost suburbs
Seseña isn’t alone. Valdeluz, another symbol of the housing crash located 75 km east of Madrid, was originally designed for 30,000 people but left to rot when the market collapsed. Today, its population is 6,000 and growing fast—potentially by 50% over the next four years, according to mayor Enrique Quintana.
Similarly, Bernuy de Porreros, a sleepy village 100 km north of the capital, is seeing its mostly abandoned housing estates roar back to life. Civil servant Lucía, 37, bought her house there this year. Her commute includes a short drive and 28-minute ride on Spain’s high-speed train, costing her just €1.60 per trip thanks to frequent-traveller discounts.
The development was kickstarted by Sareb, Spain’s so-called “bad bank”, which began selling foreclosed properties in 2021 for as little as €97,000. Four years later, prices have doubled.
Greater Madrid is expanding—whether it wants to or not
Madrid, once a dense and compact city, is beginning to resemble cities like Paris and London, with sprawling suburbs extending ever deeper into surrounding provinces.
According to José María García, regional vice minister of housing and infrastructure, Madrid’s metro area (currently home to 7 million people) will grow by another million over the next 15 years. The region has a shortfall of between 80,000 and 100,000 homes and plans to build 110,000 new units by 2028—well short of what’s needed.
For many families, the solution isn’t in the city at all. It’s in finding places like Seseña—ignored, unfinished, and unloved for years—but still within commuting range and priced within reach.
What was once labelled a crash site of speculative madness may now be the unlikely frontier of a new phase in Spain’s housing story.
