Seseña is a municipality located in the province of Toledo

Toledo (province)

Toledo is a province of central Spain, in the western part of the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha. It is bordered by the provinces of Madrid, Cuenca, Ciudad Real, Badajoz, Cáceres, and Ávila....

, Castile-La Mancha

Castile-La Mancha

Castile-La Mancha is an autonomous community of Spain. Castile-La Mancha is bordered by Castile and León, Madrid, Aragon, Valencia, Murcia, Andalusia, and Extremadura. It is one of the most sparsely populated of Spain's autonomous communities...

, Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

. According to the 2009 census

Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

 (INE

Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spain)

The National Institute of Statistics is the official organisation in Spain that collects statistics about demography, economy, and Spanish society. Every 10 years, this organisation conducts a national census. The last census took place in 2001....

), the municipality had a population of 16,231.

Residencial Francisco Hernando

Although in a historically a sparsely populated area, Seseña has gained some infamy as a result of a controversial new speculative development project, Residencial Francisco Hernando.

This development was built in Seseña by property developer Onde 2000 during the construction boom of the 2000s due to the municipality's location within commuting distance of Madrid. It was to be one of the largest such developments in Spain, with an original plan of 13,500 units costing over 9 billion euros to build. However, the massive project raised eyebrows, since utilities such as water and gas lines were not included in the plans (ending up the completed units lacked these fundamentals which rendered them essentially uninhabitable), and also as the project had been approved unusually quickly. It turned out that the authorities had been bribed, and the local mayor was soon arrested.

Following scandal and the economic crisis related to the Spanish property bubble

Spanish property bubble

The Spanish property bubble refers to the massive growth of real state prices observed, in various stages, from 1985 up to 2008 in Spain. The housing burst can be clearly divided in three periods: 1985-1991, in which the price nearly tripled, 1992-1996, in which the price remained somewhat stable,...

, the developer ran into trouble sustaining demand and financing for the project. By mid-2008 fewer than 3000 of the completed apartments had been sold and fewer than a third of the sold apartments were occupied, leaving the development a "ghost town

Ghost town

A ghost town is an abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters...

" reminder of Spain's economic woes.

The developer, Francisco Hernando, was never criminally charged with wrongdoing and has moved his business to New Guinea.