Jason Lee Beckwith now has his very own village (Image: Instagram/jasonbeckwith1)
A man has snapped up an entire village for just – and he plans to turn it into a haven. American Jason Lee Beckwith traded his in his native California for the village in north-Western Spain despite speaking just a few words of Spanish.
Jason sold his property in the USA and spent the €310,000 (just over £260,000) on Salto de Castro, an idyllic hydroelectric village with 44 houses, a guesthouse, bar, swimming pool, church, old barracks and sports facilities.
He had been looking around for a new investment, but the moment he saw a listing for Salto de Castro his mind was made up: ”It was like a switch flipped in my head,” he explained.
Salto de Castro’s church is set to be the first building Jason restores (Image: gofundme)
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He plans to restore the village one building at a time. The first job will be to restore Salto de Castro’s church and use it to host all kinds of ceremonies before he gets to work on the village’s swimming pool.
This village has 44 houses in total. There is a bar and a school with several classrooms, as well as a guesthouse with planning approval for 14 rooms. There is also an old police barracks, a swimming pool and sports facilities.
Salto de Castro was originally built in the early 1950s by an electricity generation company in order to house the families of workers who were building the nearby reservoir.
However, after the work was complete, the inhabitants gradually moved away by the 1980s. The village near the Portuguese border has stood abandoned for more than three decades.
Jason has a major building project on his hands (Image: Instagram/jasonbeckwith1)
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Jason and his wife say they intend to bring Salto de Castro back to life while preserving its original architecture and harmony with the surroundings of the Meseta Ibérica nature reserve where it is located. “It will never change and I love that; we are not going to build Disneyland,” he stresses.
He estimates that the total cost of the restoration & transformation of Salto De Castro is estimated to be upwards of five million Euros (about £4million). It is expected that there will be some measure of subsidy from the Spanish national government as well as the local Junta de Castilla y León region.
Jason has launched a GoFundMe fundraiser to help with the project, which so far has raised $510 (£390) of a hoped-for $300,000 (£230,000).