From the looks of things at the newly built Aparta Hotel Residencia, you would never know that it was the high summer tourist season in Canet d'En Berenguer, a town of 5,000 just north of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast to Spain. The 308 apartments in the compound, completed this spring, are all unoccupied. Grass has started to sprout between the red terra-cotta tiles that lead to the empty, peanut-shaped swimming pool.
The residence is just one of a trail of buildings dotting the sandy coastline that were constructed by Enrique Bañuelos as he amassed a fortune of more than €4 billion, or $5.4 billion, over the past 15 years. Bañuelos lost much of that money - and that of shareholders - as the stock market punished the firm he had founded, Astroc Mediterraneo, as the housing market in Spain cooled rapidly.
