Malia Márquez is the author of the novels City of Smoke and Sea and This Fierce Blood. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Literary Hub, and The Georgia Review. She teaches creative writing and co-writes Remnant from Los Angeles.
A ¥2.9M farmhouse in Japan's emptiest prefecture, a live €1 house program in Rubia Daniels's Sicilian town, a hideout behind the Cinque Terre, and an alpine province that will grant you up to €100,000 to rebuild a mountain house. Two articles crossed our desk
Country Guides
Country Guides
Country Guides
Country Guides
Country Guides
Four stone houses on Spain's pilgrim routes from €93,000 — a medieval house in Mondoñedo, a restored complex where the Camino passes by the front door, and more. Last year, the official count from the cathedral’s Pilgrim’s Office of people who walked the Camino into the
If you read this newsletter, you are a person who has at least daydreamed about buying a piece of another country because it is beautiful and cheaper than home.
Emptiness, it turns out, is everyone's project right now. There are vacant houses across the globe everywhere, and almost everyone in charge has decided it is a problem worth real money to solve. They just disagree, fascinatingly, about how.
Sardinia and Calabria are the examples in this issue, but they are part of a broader pattern of repopulation grants — income support, business start-up money, symbolic rents — aimed at getting working-age people to stay and live.
In Spain, the answer has increasingly been immigrants. Whole villages in "España vaciada," the emptied interior, have been brought back from the edge by families from Latin America and Morocco.
We have been thinking more generally about infrastructure and resources, things you can't really know until you spend several seasons in a place.