In November, Spanish clothing billionaire Amancio Ortega paid about $850 million in cash for the historic Canada Post building in Vancouver—a sprawling tech hub spanning an entire city block with more than a million square feet of office space leased to Amazon. It broke the record for the largest office sale ever in Canada.

It also marked the secretive Zara founder’s 13th real estate purchase last year. Altogether the Spaniard, who is worth $141 billion, spent more than $3 billion last year across 10 cities in 8 countries, buying up seven office buildings, two hotels, two industrial properties, a luxury retail complex and an apartment tower, plus a 49% stake in a large British port operator.

More and more of the world’s wealthiest are pumping billions into real estate. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison owns nearly $3 billion of properties including the Hawaiian island of Lanai, hotels in California and Florida plus a Palm Beach estate, while hedge fund titan Ken Griffin has shelled out nearly $2 billion in recent years on lavish homes in Florida, France, London and New York.

But no one has spent so much of their spare change on real estate as Ortega. Since taking Zara’s parent Inditex, the world’s largest clothing retailer, public on the Madrid stock exchange in 2001, the now 90-year-old Ortega has shelled out roughly $24 billion on 216 properties in nearly 100 markets; he’s held onto all but 10 of them. That’s more than the estimated $20 billion Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has sunk into his rocket maker Blue Origin.

Forbes combed through corporate filings, land records and press releases in nine countries plus data from real estate databases Regrid and Real Capital Analytics to map out Ortega’s real estate empire. It’s worth an estimated $25 billion, spanning more than 200 properties across 13 countries. That makes him the top property baron in the world with a more valuable portfolio than the most successful property developers, Australia’s Harry Triguboff ($23.2 billion) and America’s Donald Bren ($19.2 billion).

The son of a railway worker, Ortega got his start as a gofer in a shirt store at age 14. In the 1960s, he and his then-wife Rosalía Mera, a seamstress, started making gowns and lingerie in his living room. They launched Zara in 1975 and Inditex a decade later. They divorced in 1986 but she remained involved as a board member until 2004 and a shareholder until her death in 2013.

Ortega started investing in real........

© Forbes