The changes brought on by gradual cultivation of unimproved lands on the other hand enriched the owners of such lands quite out of proportion to their original value. When pastures were converted into farm plots, the price was augmented. A hato contained more than sixteen hundred caballerias at thirty-three acres per caballeria. The corral contained more than four hundred. The caballeria pasture land cost from ten to twenty-five pesos; as soon as it was cultivated, its lowest price was three hundred pesos. Thus a hato, worth at most forty thousand pesos, was in its new state worth more than four hundred and eighty-four thousand. Likewise a corral, originally valued at most at ten thousand pesos, rose in price to one hundred and twenty thousand. The same was true of building lots. A caballeria in the suburbs, divided into _solares_, house plots, could sometimes bring eighty-five thousand pesos. A caballeria to the southwest of Havana was worth three thousand pesos, one in the neighborhood of Matanzas only five hundred. The extraordinary wealth of certain convents, frequently commented upon by economists and historians, was due to the gradual and enormous increase in the price of the land which had originally been given to them. From these early grants and concessions were derived the privileges which some private properties and some convents enjoyed; they had for instance the right to forbid the building in their neighborhood of houses beyond a certain height, a precious privilege in a city where the circulation of air had not been overencouraged. M. Masse comments at length upon these conditions in his book on Havana. He says: "The immense fortunes of certain Havana families are thus explained. The sobriety of the Spaniards, the very limited taste and luxury found in their residences and their furnishings, a commercial management which favored agricultural products, would have ended in concentrating in a few hands fortunes rivalling those of kings, had not libertinism, the rage of lawsuits and the passion for gambling produced that instability, which some moralists would have liked to secure by other means, though these were not easily found."