过度建设后的西班牙"鬼域"

The town of Sesena, a half hour south of Madrid used to look like this typical white washed walls and buildings just a few stories tall. But the new part oftown looks like this massive apartment blocks rising above the plains of Le Marche. The problem many of these are vacant and Sesena is not alone. Across Spain there are many so-called ghost towns, the result of overbuilding during the real estate boom before the recession hit.

That's what a lot of people have called this place in interviews when there wasn't very much here.

Juan Dominguez is president of the neighbourhood association, serving the few thousand people who bought homes here and got far less than they expected. Many of the shops that were promised have yet materialized. Lockouts where stores should be are breaked up and there are numerous "For sale" signs.

The neibourhood association office is open just twice a week. It has secured a few smaller improvements like the new tennis and pedal courts. Dominguez insists he and many others are pleased with their affordable housing, even as we look out on 2,300 new apartments in the same development that are vacant without city occupancy permits. The city and the developer have gone to court over who should provide water hookups and road access.

When do you think you will have neighbours there?

I think after local elections next year there will be a change at the city hall and a new dialogue with the developer to finish all the construction details.

There are hundreds of thousands of new homes aross Spain like these in Sesena which not only are unoccupied, they are unsold.

Back at the city hall the mayor says beyond the issue of local politics what happend in Sisania also happend across Spain during the boom years.

Housing was built not to live in but for speculation not based on the actual need but to get rich as quickly as possible using mortgage loans from the banks.

The developer Francisco Arnaldo, one of Spain's best known building tycoons, put his very name on this new neighbourhood. Arnaldo wouldn’t talk with cnn for this report, but his spokesman told us Arnaldo was proud of the development and the building quality and he hopes it would be completed when local politics and market permit. This investment from executive in Madrid says it could take years to sell all the excess housing across Spain.

The market can take up to 200,000 new homes a year and with an excess stock now of about one million, it could take six to ten years for the market to absorb all these new homes.

For Sesena and similar developments near Spain cities along the coastline, the hangover from the boom years sits in plain view.