Life in Culebrón

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.  A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000. A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 house...