Rent Here Is €0.88 a Year: 12 of the World’s Oldest Homes People Still Live In

Guinness World Records lists Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Yamanashi, Japan, as the oldest hotel in the world, operating since 705 AD. The second-oldest hotel is in Japan, too.

The inn says its hot spring has flowed without a break for more than 1,300 years, ever since it opened in the second year of the Keiun era. The building guests sleep in today is much newer, from a renewal in 1997, but the inn itself has been open for 13 centuries.

Hōshi, a ryokan in Awazu Onsen in Ishikawa, Japan, traces its history back more than 1,300 years. The name Hōshi Zengorō is handed down from one head of the inn to the next, and the current owner, the 47th generation, still uses it.

In 1996, Guinness registered Hōshi as the world’s oldest hotel; the title later went to Keiunkan. In 1987, it joined the Hénokiens, an association of family companies that are at least 200 years old.

Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, also called Sky City, sits on top of a sheer-walled, 367-foot sandstone bluff. Its establishment was first recorded in 1150, and the tribe describes it as the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America.

More than 250 homes on the mesa have kept to tradition and gone without electricity, sewer or water. The Acoma people number more than 5,000 today, and the tribe’s cultural center welcomes visitors on guided tours.

In 1521, the merchant Jakob Fugger founded the Fuggerei in Augsburg, Germany, in his own name and his brothers’, as homes for Augsburg citizens in need.

More than 500 years later, it is the oldest social housing complex in the world still in use: 67 buildings with 142 apartments, a small “city within a city.” About 150 people live there, and the yearly base rent is still just €0.88. Visitors can tour a museum and a show apartment.

The multi-story adobe homes of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico are estimated to have been built between 1000 and 1450, and the tribe says they look the same today as when they were first built.

They are made entirely of adobe, earth mixed with water and straw, and the roofs of all five stories rest on big timbers called vigas. The two main buildings, North House and South House, are the originals. Taos Pueblo became a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1992.

Traquair House calls itself Scotland’s oldest inhabited house: people have lived there for more than 900 years, and it has belonged to the same family since 1491.

Its Bear Gates went up at the top of the main drive in 1737–38, and the bill included 4 gallons of ale for the workmen who put up the stone bears. Family legend says the gates were shut in 1745, never to open until a Stuart was back on the throne. Historic Environment Scotland says they were actually closed in 1796. Either way, they are still shut, and visitors come in by a side drive.

Matera’s Sassi, a district of homes dug into the limestone in southern Italy, has been inhabited since about 850. In the early 1950s, the Italian government called it a national embarrassment: many homes had no clean water, electricity or sewage. The district was emptied, and its 20,000 residents moved to new apartments.

In 1993, UNESCO made the Sassi a World Heritage site. Today much of the area is boutique cave hotels, restaurants, galleries and artist studios, and from the outside it looks almost the same as it did before it was emptied.

The Oldest House on Sunset Hill was built in 1686 and is believed to be the oldest home on Nantucket still on its original site. It was built as a wedding gift for Jethro Coffin and Mary Gardner, whose families had never gotten along.

The house went up on Gardner land with Coffin lumber. By the late 1800s it stood empty, but a Coffin family reunion in 1881 revived interest in it, and it was restored in the 20th century. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1968.

Built in 1765, the Old Stone House in Georgetown is the oldest structure on its original foundation in Washington, D.C. In 1791, George Washington stayed at a Georgetown tavern run by John Suter. Suter’s son, also named John, ran a clock shop in the stone house.

Over the years, local memory mixed up the two buildings and the two John Suters, and that fuzzy story helped save the house while the neighborhood changed around it. It was a car dealership when the government bought it in 1953, and the National Park Service opened it to the public in 1960.

Skara Brae, on Orkney in Scotland, was a thriving farming village 5,000 years ago, long before Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. It is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe. Nobody lives there now; it lay hidden until a storm uncovered it in 1850.

Each one-room house still has its stone furniture: a dresser, perhaps for showing off special objects, two box beds and a hearth. No weapons have been found, which suggests a peaceful life.

For more than a century, the adobe house across from San Miguel Chapel in Santa Fe has been called the oldest house in the city, and an 1882 bird’s-eye map labels it the “oldest building.” Its actual age is not known.

Tree-ring samples from its wooden roof beams date to about 1740–67. But parts of the lower walls of one room are puddled adobe, a Native building method older than the adobe bricks the Spanish brought. So the walls may be older than the roof, and nobody can say by how much.

Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks and their six children settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1636, and their house was built between 1637 and 1641. It is the oldest surviving timber-framed house in North America. Jonathan made spinning wheels, a skilled trade at the time.

The family kept the house for generations, until Rebecca Fairbanks, the last of them to live there, moved out in 1904. Relatives then bought it to preserve it, and it has been a museum for more than 100 years.