Investering: koop een Spaans dorp

For sale. Village in Spain. Needs work. Price €45,000 It sounds like somebody’s idea of a joke – or a dream.

But these astonishing offers are coming up all the time as crisis-hit Spaniards sell off property that has been in the family for generations.

Their sun-kissed country is dotted with abandoned villages, like ghost towns in films of the old Wild West.

And nearly a third of the foreigners buying them up are Britons, according to Spanish estate agents.

The Sunday People can reveal that one such adventurer is former ITV transmission controller Neil Christie, 61, who snapped up the tiny village of Arruñada, bordering Asturias and Galicia in the north west.