Bigyin wrote on Jun 16^th, 2011 at 12:01am:


If as John has pointed out money can not be made then the land has no value other than as hunting ground, probably about 100 euros a hectare in that case! Land is a commodity of sorts, if you can't build on it or make money from it, it ceases to have any quantifiable value.   
So I want a piece of land to build-renovate a house on and have a smallholding and make a partial income from it, if I can't do that then the land has no value to me and I wont buy it.
What would you pay for land that you can do nothing with, why would you hand over money with no possibility of it making a return on your investment?                           

Nen is right.

You won't make a living from your crops, you probably won't be allowed to put new dwellings up if it's the same as in Catalonia, and you probably will pay more for your land than it is really worth!

Having said that, many people buy land here for the lifestyle they can have, for the sunny climate, the laid back way of life etc.

It's not all about making money. I know that if I sold my land now, I would get less than half of what I paid for it 7 years ago when land prices werre much higher and crops were worth more.

I sometimes burn my crops in the log burner! Why you ask? Simple.. logs cost much more to buy than I can get for my almonds.  If I sell my almonds and spend all the money on logs I will be out of pocket. The almonds burn like wood, and cost far less!

Most of the time though, I just let them fall to the floor and let them rot. It really isn't worth investing the time or money to harvest them. Harvesting by hand is a back breaker and investing in the equipment to do it mechanically will cost more than you will likely  recover in your  lifetime!

There's no way you will make enough money off the land to keep a family.

You could always re-invent yourself as a builder, estate agent or fishing guide as many others have done before you 

If you don't speak Spanish (and/or Catalan if you are in Catalunya) you will almost certainly fail to find work working for any Spanish company. I don't know what your skills are, but you will almost certainly need to be self employed doing whatever you do.  An income from agriculture is really a non starter.

Bigyin wrote on Jun 16^th, 2011 at 7:35pm:


Not if you do what everybody here does (produce low quality products for the coperativa) But making money is possible if you do something different. In Pinell de brai for instance there is an English couple that do things different. They make high quality products and export these directly themselves. Seems they are doing quite well:

http://www.donferrantiwine.com/where_we_are.php
http://www.ferrantioliveoil.com/index.php

Thank you El Alto, people obviously do make money out of agriculture or they wouldn't be doing it. I recently heard of a British farmer who has moved from Greece to Spain because he could buy a larger farm, he was on one of the islands and couldn't expand anymore where he was. He also pointed out that the locals had not moved with the times and wouldn't even invest in labour saving methods.

My word they do have a good profit margin, can't say I am not envious, good luck to them!

Nigel wrote on Jun 16^th, 2011 at 11:35pm:


Welsh? That is something like British Catalunya isn't it? For a Dutchie it's just the same island