The Sicilian town that put its empty houses up for sale for €1 each to try to reverse its decline, has sold 16 of them to foreign buyers. Though they sold for slightly more than €1.

The local council adopted a strategy in January that has become fashionable in the south of Italy: sell abandoned homes to anyone who wants to move in through an auction starting at €1.

“If those who participate do not bid higher, the houses will be sold for the price of a croissant,” said Sambuca’s deputy mayor, Giuseppe Cacioppo, at the time.

The news travelled fast and by the next day hundreds of people from the UK, Dubai, Panama and Russia had arrived in Sambuca, about an hour’s drive from Palermo, to visit the properties. Meanwhile, the council office phones did not stop ringing for weeks.

“They were calling from Sydney, London and New York,” Cacioppo told the Guardian. “A few weeks after the announcement, we received almost 100,000 emails with many potential buyers grabbing the first available flights to Sicily.”

On Wednesday, the mayor announced the sale of the first 16 houses owned by the municipality: the cheapest went for €1,000, the most expensive for €25,000. The remainder averaged between €5,000 and €10,000.

Among the new owners are British, Russian, Chilean and Israeli families.

Cacioppo said 50 other houses had been sold privately to foreign buyers.

“We did not expect to be so successful,” he said, “but what can I say? This is extraordinary. Between private homes and houses owned by the municipality, we have received investments totalling €1m. It is a real treasure for a small city like ours.”

The €1 house sales will also become the subject of a television show: the Discovery Channel has decided to buy a house and assign it to the actor Lorraine Bracco to transform it into the set of a programme dedicated to the survival strategies of Sambuca.

Can selling its homes for the price of an espresso save this Sicilian town? Read more

Once a bustling town of 9,000 people, Sambuca, which sits inside a nature reserve surrounded by woods and mountains, now has about 5,000 inhabitants. The decline began when farm workers were forced to leave after the industrialisation of the agricultural sector. In January 1968, an earthquake hit the Belice valley, in south-west Sicily, killing 231 people, injuring more than 1,000 and leaving 100,000 homeless. Four towns were razed entirely and others, such as Sambuca, suffered terrible damage, causing more families to abandon their homes.

Other Italian villages at risk of becoming ghost towns have attempted the same strategy to reverse the decline, including Gangi in northern Sicily, Salemi in the west, near Marsala, and Ollolai in Sardinia. They are towns that refuse to disappear and are determined do anything it takes to survive, even if it means selling their homes for the price of a coffee.