History And Spanish Property
One likely historical explanation for cave building in Spain is that the Arabs brought the tradition with them in the eighth century basing the idea on the troglodyte dwellings of North Africa. Right up until the 1950s tens of thousands of native farming communities lived in these caves but with the advent of tourism in the early 1960s a mass exodus of the workforce to the lucrative coasts meant that many caves were simply abandoned.
Nowadays many British and other northern Europeans, are attracted to the idea of escaping to the small cave communities inland from the busy resorts on the coast with their affordability and practicality making them very attractive to people who would otherwise not be able to get a foot on the Spanish property market.