Sicilian town selling homes for €1

Potential homeowners are being offered the chance to buy hilltop villas on the Italian island of Sicily for less than the price of a cappuccino.

Local officials in the picturesque southwestern town of Sambuca are selling off dozens of properties for €1 each - about 90p - in a bid to encourage people to move there and help boost its economy.

Like many other rural areas in the south of Italy and across Sicily, Sambuca is facing a depopulation problem as locals relocate to larger urban areas, CNN reports.

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But while the new real estate proposition may sound tempting, there’s a catch.

Buyers are obligated to invest €15,000 (£13,000) in renovating their property within three years, and must also pay a €5,000 (£4,400) security deposit that will be returned when the refurbishment is complete.

Sambuca “isn’t the first Italian town to tease outsiders with seemingly too-good-to-be-true offers”, says The New York Post. However, it is “the first to minimise red tape so anyone interested can make their purchase ASAP”, the newspaper adds.

Giuseppe Cacioppo, the town’s deputy mayor and tourist councillor, told CNN: “As opposed to other towns that have merely done this for propaganda, this city hall owns all €1 houses on sale.”

“We’re not intermediaries who liaise between old and new owners. You want that house, you’ll get it no time,” he continued, adding that ten properties had already been sold.

According to New York-based website Insider, the trend of selling ultra-cheap Italian houses for renovation dates back to at least 2015, when the Sicilian town of Gangi offered vacant homes for €1.

In January last year, officials in the Sardinian town of Ollolai put 200 homes on the market for the same price, in a bid to reverse declines that had seen the town’s population fall from 2,250 people to 1,300 in 50 years. New residents were expected to spend at least €25,000 (£22,000) on renovations within three years.

Regardless of such expenses, mayor Cacioppo insists overseas buyers won’t regret joining the “rescue crusade” to preserve Sambuca and its “lovely Arab heritage”.

The town was founded by the Ancient Greeks and later conquered by the Saracens, who turned it into a trade hub. Named after an emir called Al Zabut, aka the Splendid One, Sambuca is “an open-air museum, a patchwork of contrasting architectural styles”, says CNN.