Have you ever heard of Amancio Ortega?
If you live in Galicia you should have. He and his wife started a small clothing business in the Galician city of A Coruña in the 1970s and that business ultimately became Inditex (owner of Zara, Bershka, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, etc.), which is Galicia’s biggest economic success story.
Amancio Ortega still owns 59% of the company, and this along with his worldwide property empire makes him the world’s richest person (although he and Bill Gates regularly trade places based on stock value fluctuations).
Inditex is headquartered in Arteixo, just to the west of A Coruña …but Arteixo is a very industrial place dominated by a large oil refinery, so not really all that nice for the senior executives at Inditex to live in (or have their summer houses in). Instead, they choose the Concello of Oleiros, to the east of A Coruña, for their generous villas, and they do this in such numbers that Oleiros is now the Concello with the highest number of millionaires living in it anywhere in Spain.
As well as access to A Coruña city centre in under 15 minutes, Oleiros has a string of stunning beaches, a coastal forest national park, excellent transport links via motorways and the nearby A Coruña international airport, and in general a pretty exceptional lifestyle at a much lower cost than in the UK or northern Europe.
So today the galiciaproperty.com blog takes a quick surf over the Oleiros property market and picks our favourite currently available properties in Oleiros. As ever we’re in a disposed towards large, interesting properties with sea views sort of mood…
If you see anything that you really like here then keep in mind that galiciaproperty.com’s Property Search and Property Checks services can save you a lot of money – get us to visit the house and send you a report, negotiate a better price, and perhaps also perform a structural survey and documentation checks before you sign anything.
So, the properties, in price order:
1) 235.000€ – small house in great gardens in a costal forest park
It’s a fairly small house by Galician standards BUT set in immaculately maintained, large gardens (complete with small swimming pool) that actually fall within the boundary of a national park, the Dexo Serrantes coastal forest park. And this also serves to protect the house from anyone else ever building near it. If you want complete privacy in stunning natural surroundings, but also with all the benefits of a large city and international airport 15 minutes away, then this is an interesting property.
2) 320.000€ – recently constructed villa in a good residential location
Montrove is an area located on a pleasant hilltop looking across at the city. It’s close enough to make the city centre and airport easily accessible, but has the spaciousness and the views that can’t be found much closer in. This house looks like a 10-15 year old building. It’s not the prettiest but it has good indoor and outdoor spaces all underpinned by some nice valley views.
3) 340.000€ – lovely garden with a big pool and decent internal decor
As there is no location given for this listing (as always!) it’s a little hard to be conclusive about this house. It looks a slightly older modern chalet, late 80s or early 90s, but comes with the larger plot size typical of that era (2000m2 instead of 500m2, which is more common these days). The gardens look well laid out, mature and well maintained, and the house has a very large swimming pool. Inside the house has a lot of good quality woodwork, a recently refurbished kitchen and generally unusually nice (for Galicia) base decor.
4) 350.000€ – big house with uninterrupted sea views, good gardens and a big pool
On the edge of cliff near Mera, in the north of the Concello, this large house has a lot of nice spaces, including a big pool and an outdoor covered dining area. Inside there is an occasionally oppressive wood theme going on, but what stands out about this house is its first in line from the coast location giving uninterrupted sea views.
5) 350.000€ – vast, crazy house in lovely Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz is probably the most beautiful spot in Oleiros. It’s a really nice small town centred around a castle on a small island accessible by footbridge from the excellent beach. Smack in the middle of it, where plot prices are at a premium based on some of the very expensive ultra-architecty recent builds nearby, is this enormous house which features the craziest roof I think I’ve ever seen. It probably doesn’t really suit conventional residential accommodation use that well, but someone after a building to turn into a small boutique hotel might find this a great bargain.
6) 435.000€ – big, solid, generous, well located
There’s no one stunning feature about this house, it just generally adds up. The location looks like one of the prime residential areas of Oleiros, and so the generous gardens and private layout of this property is mirrored by those of its neighbours’. It even has a small guest house on the property.
7) 600.000€ – isolated house with a private beach access just 5 mins from the city centre
Someone must want/need to sell this house, because when I last spotted it in late 2015 they were asking well in excess of a million for it. It’s a rather ugly 1980s Galician villa style build, but the price makes sense when you know the exact location – it’s one of three houses built between some of the best beaches in this area and where you could never get planning permission these days. And has it’s own beach access. Load up this map and zoom out…
8) 725.000€ – historic and beautiful
You can’t recreate this kind of house, you can only buy one that already exists. This has so much character and would inspire so much love that it would almost overcome the complete lack of insulation and damp proofing that this doubtless features! There’s something about a house and gardens that clearly have a history longer than any of us have been alive for, and this place has this in spades. It has a private chapel too.
9) 800.000€ – from the days when you could build a house on a clifftop
Back in the early 1980s you could build more or less what you liked where you fancied, with adequate bribes to local politicians anyway. The best located houses from this era rarely come up, but here is one of them. On a clifftop and complete with a staircase down to the sea. The interior actually looks pretty basic (unrestored 1970s Galician floor tiling throughout), but with this view, location and outdoor spaces who really cares?
10) 900.000€ – not just coastal, on the beach!
We’ve had two houses with direct access to rocky shores, but what about to an actual grade A beach? Here you go. It’s a pretty nice house too.