I bought a 1500 masia in the middle of the Catalonian mountains

Well, I bought a 1500 house in the middle of the Catalonian mountains. Yep, I might be a bit insane.

Truth be told this might be an old obsession. When I moved to Spain with my family I was around 12 and the first place we landed was an old masia: Campalans. That masia hosted us for about six years, and I loved it very much.

I hated many things about being there:

• I was two kilometres away from the closest town, which had 500 people.
• I had little to no friends.
• I was an immigrant, a brown one.
• I was trying to learn a local language, failing mostly, and it wasn’t great times…

But I loved the feeling of the house. It felt so stable, it felt so strong. All that time it had been standing, to me, just that thought was crazy. I came from Colombia; you know, colonization didn’t give us that. So sleeping in a house that was older than Colombia’s independence was simply insane. The house was also massive. It had so many rooms. It was part of a campsite, which was what we ran by then with my family. I slept on my own on the top floor, which had over 8 huge rooms, the window in mine was about 50x50 and the wall separating me from the outside was probably the same width.

Campalans is in Borredà, in the Berguedà, at kilometre 2 of the road from Borredà to Sant Jaume de Frontanyà. The current building is from the 17th century, but there was a Campalans there well before that: in 1536 it was answering to a prior called Joan de Pinós, who held the direct lordship over its land, and paying its tithes to the Augustinian community at Sant Jaume de Frontanyà. Remember this name, because it’s somehow important later on.

Why these lands still exist

Since then, I had had a strange fixation with masias. The word comes from the Latin mansus, a medieval unit of land plus the dwelling on it, and you find mas across Provence, Languedoc, Roussillon, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics. A western Mediterranean thing. But what’s interesting is not just the building. It’s the law that kept it standing, and that is genuinely one of the most interesting things I know.

Here’s the short version, and it’s all about inheritance. The whole point of Catalan succession law was to keep the family patrimony in one piece. So there was the hereu, the firstborn, who inherited the house and the land whole and undivided (and if there were no sons, the eldest daughter, the pubilla, took it instead). Everyone else, the cabalers, got the llegítima: a quarter of the estate’s VALUE, split between all of them, and owed as a sum of money rather than as a piece of the property. So the house never got cut up. Not once, not in four hundred years.

The deal usually got sealed in the capítols matrimonials, the marriage contract, right when the hereu married, because that was the moment he needed a home to offer. So, one child got a house and a mountain, the rest got a number and a strong suggestion to go be something else.

Which is brutal, and is also exactly why these houses and their enormous plots of land are still standing in one piece. The role those houses played is the whole story of this landscape. If you want to feel that rather than read the law, Irene Solà’s Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres is a single day inside one masia in the Guilleries holding seven generations of women across four centuries, bandits and witches included. Absolutely recommend.

Ten years of pointing at someone else’s house

But of course obsession does not mean capacity, so while I have always been somehow in love with masias it was always something I thought I could never have. Time passed, I moved on with my life, did everything, fulfilled a lot of other dreams, some smaller, some bigger, but on the way, I must say, it was always in the back of my head. Then we moved to another town years later, and there on the dog walk path was another very pretty masia, always looking at me, kinda calling, so imposing. And every time I crossed it, for the past 10 years I have been joking “Look, that’s my house”, and I even asked several times “who does my house belong to” like I was ever able to buy it.

But if anything, I am delusional.

(I wrote about my parents, the community plan and the financial side of all this back in May, so I’ll skip the retelling. This is the other half of the story.)

What these things actually cost

But as it became a little bit more plausible in my mind (mind you, plausible, still highly unachievable) I started skimming the internet for one. Just out of curiosity, kind of like to get used to it, to get used to prices, to get used to sizes, to get used to locations, to understand the market, even if I was never going to do anything with that information. So it became one of my new obsessions. This was easily my top hobby over the last three years.

To buy a masia, you have two possibilities:

• One, getting a plot of land where there is a very old masia, usually just the stones left, and rebuild it.
• Two, buying a masia that has managed to stay whole itself.

Now, the first one seemed more plausible the moment I started looking for it because, well, I thought, “You know what, this is going to be the project of a lifetime. I’m going to buy a plot of land. It’s going to be, I don’t know, maybe 50k and I’ll spend probably the rest of my money for the rest of my life just bringing that house up.” It seemed like a fantastic plan, won’t lie. Also, to rebuild a historical building I loved so much was just a dream.

Reality hit very hard. Prices rose heavily over the past five years on those plots of land to the point that it was just simply stupidity. We’re talking about 200k for literally a wall. And rebuilding a place like that, considering that we’re talking about stone walls, is just simply too expensive. I’ve known cases of people that have bought them and refurbished them to a very high level of standard and they have spent about a million euros. I don’t have a million euros, and I don’t want to spend it on a project like that.

So again, it became a little bit less possible because I thought, well, a big one will require finally a loan, which so far has always been denied by a bank because I have been living in very different places and my financials are, well, good, just strange for the world we live in. Or just a lot of cash, which I don’t have.

But again, I continued looking, because if anything, I’m a stubborn bitch.

And one day I found one that seemed to click most of the boxes. Not all, but most. It was also expensive, but not unreasonable, it was not too far from a train station (mind you this is still the deep country side, so by that I mean 30 min), it had water from the line, it had a big enough piece of land (the goal is to not have a nasty neighbour)… With those requirements, most of the masias that were standing and whole would not go below 700K, which again, is money I do not have. The house’s original price was 650K, which was then reduced to 460K.

The number to make it happen

So for the first time I ran an experiment, I ran a hypothesis, the same way I do at work. How much would I have if I scratched every single one of my pockets, every single possibility, if I get a loan, if I get everything that I need to do on paper, how much would be the highest reasonable amount that I could pay for that house? I did all that exercise. That didn’t mean that I had that money right there. That also didn’t mean that I had the possibility. But I did the exercise. And the answer was 400k. At that state, the project will most likely need more money, but it will already allow many things from the get-go. It’s still the project of a lifetime. It will be just a different one. 400k was the number I reached, 400 tho seemed like “too big of a reduction” from an already reduced price. It was also a monumentally risky move, so I parked it somewhere and let it go for a while.

I never shared that information with anyone. Never spoke about it. It still seemed stupid. But being fair, I did at least set a goal this time. Jokingly, I eventually did share that property with my brother, we do that sometimes. I did not mention anything, I did not mention that I liked it much, I just said I considered it a good deal.

Remember I said I am a stubborn bitch? Well, my brother is a stubborn one too, this also comes from above, and that’s what makes our family so powerful. We just crush our heads against the wall until we find a way to get it done. And if there’s something I learned out of my parents and my family, it’s that resilient wish and will to make things happen in a way that I am baffled sometimes.

So he, without saying anything more than “Well, I don’t think that’s a possibility,” silently decided to go and see it. One day, maybe like 3 weeks later, I got a random call from him. It was April 2026. I was leaving the gym. And he asked me, “If you would go to see a masia, what would you ask? What would be the questions?” And I assumed this might be for a friend or so and just because he knows that I have been that crazy bitch looking for random masias I couldn’t buy for the past three years, I would have a lot of questions in my hypothetical scenario.

So I gave him some and three hours later, I got another call: “Can we speak?” He saw what I saw, a world of possibilities at a fairly decent price. And before I said anything, because I never shared that information with anyone, he said, “I think we can get it for 400k.”

And listen, I’m not a spiritual person. I honestly don’t believe in anything very much. But sometimes, some things are quite a curious moment. It could be a coincidence, I don’t care. It’s just a funny and interesting one, isn’t it? Around all those numbers that day, thinking about what would I do if I would have the chance to buy this? How much money can I get? And I got exactly to that same amount, what are the odds.

Wait, can we actually buy this?

So, we started working. We decided we could go for it and this time it would not be myself, not alone. And I thank my brother every day for that because I don’t even think I could have done it. It’s been, well, since April, and after a lot of paperwork and headaches we finally have the transfer of ownership signed. That house now belongs to us.

And I cannot even fucking believe it because it’s absolutely insane.

It’s a mountain, 16 hectares, with five separate houses, a central patio and… a chapel. We basically bought a town.

A little bit of history

Santa Anna, the little chapel, is 22 square metres and it was built in 1604 according to the stone inscription in the entrance (MDCIIII). 1604 in Catalonia is bandits everywhere and the king’s viceroys at open war with the Catalan institutions. And in the middle of that, this family widened the house, moved the wine vats and the cistern out, and built a wall around the living quarters, which by then already had three buildings inside it. A muralla, which is the word you’d use for a city wall, except this one goes around a farmhouse and has a bastion on it.

The chapel was the piece that closed the ring. They built it into the wall, so its east side isn’t beside the wall, it IS the wall, and the door opens right next to the bastion. The bell, from its espadanya, was rung to scatter the fog and the hailstorms. In the Civil War the chapel was looted and stripped, and afterwards they used it as a granary until 1960.

And now the name. Remember Joan de Pinós, the prior who held the lordship over Campalans in 1536?

The Pinós were one of the big Catalan noble houses. In 1374 the baron of Pinós, Pere Galceran, bought the entire Sant Jaume de Frontanyà territory off the lord of Mataplana, which is how Campalans, the house I grew up in, ended up answering to them. And the family takes its name from the place they came from: a town in the Solsonès called Pinós.

This masia, the one we just signed for, is in that tiny little town called Pinós.

So the family that owned the ground under the house I grew up in is named after the village where, six hundred and fifty years later, I bought my own. Make of that what you want. I’m choosing to find it wonderful.

And I have so many plans because I thought about it so many times. Now, it’s time to stop planning and start doing, which is what I enjoy the most but it’s also incredibly terrifying. I won’t be doing this alone, this will be a communal project with partners already lined up, and I can’t wait to see it alive.

So yes, I bought a 1500 house in the middle of Catalunya to build a rural community. A co-living and a co-working space for remote workers who want to spend the cold North European winters in the south, or to work on their own projects alongside like-minded people. Running as self-sufficiently as we can manage, with room to host all kinds of retreats. Community and sustainability are the point of the whole thing. This just started. It’ll take some time, it’ll definitely take a lot of money, and I can’t wait to make it happen.