As expressed in bricks, mortar, and money, the collapse of the real-estate boom that had fueled the Spanish economy for a decade equals 106,900 empty new residences in Catalonia (818,000 in Spain as a whole), and that’s not counting unoccupied older homes. At the end of 2011, Spain had outstanding mortgages amounting to $820 billion. Moreover, while empty homes nationwide were expected to drop to 693,000 by 2015, the numbers for Barcelona were actually set to increase to 131,000, because the building of new houses in the country’s most prosperous region went on for longer before developers hit the brakes.
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