Ghost Villages: La España Vacía
While Spain's urban centres become ever more crowded, its villages are quickly emptying. Some have no residents left.
Mislata, Valencia, with more than 21,500 people per km2, is the most densely populated urban area on the continent. But there is a dramatic divide between the towns and the country. Despite places like Mislata, Spain is one of the lowest-density countries in Europe. There are large areas of Spain which are emptier than Lapland, in the north of Finland. Drive for an hour away from any of the cities, or hop on a cross-country train, and you will see that Spain, despite its bustling cities, is mostly a deserted land.
Above: Population density map of Europe
This hasn’t always been the case. Most developed countries are familiar with the flight to the cities which began with the industrial revolution and has continued since. But until the 1960s Spain was behind other countries in this regard. For a long time after the civil war ended in 1939 and Franco’s ultra-conservative regime took over, the county’s economy and culture stood still. People continued an agrarian lifestyle, seeing no need to move. In Valencia they picked oranges. In the Canary Islands, bananas. The Catholic Church played its part in this stagnation, keeping a stranglehold on education, social life and chastising any urge for change or progress.
From the 60s onwards, things began to open up. The fascist ideologues of the regime’s early years departed, and in their place came business-minded reformers. Spain finally lurched into the industrial age. The new industries attracted people into the cities with the promise of a higher quality of life. In the 60s and 70s Spain's economy was the second-fastest growing in the world, behind only Japan. This era came to be called 'The Spanish Miracle’.
After the transition to democracy, Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez signed the country up to the EU, and the new money this generated was used to build motorways; giving village-dwellers an easy route to the cities in place of the winding country roads of Franco’s time. Suddenly Los Picos de Europa wasn’t such an obstacle for those wishing to travel from Asturias to Madrid; now there were tunnels.
A revolution in culture and social norms also had a role. After Franco’s death, Madrid had had its own Punk moment, with La Movida Madrileña providing the soundtrack to the opening up of Spain. The excitement of electro-punk and the colourful films of Pedro Almodóvar (himself from a small pueblo in Castile-La Mancha) attracted young people into the cities, as well as a liberalisation of education and better access to universities. Suddenly Spain’s pretty villages were symbols of a repressive past many wanted to forget. Cities were the future.
In 2008, the financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard. As local manufacturing and construction industries went under, workers in rural areas were forced to search for work further afield, with many settling in the large cities, leaving their towns to crumble.
In 2020, 60 years after the liberalisation of Spain’s economy, 70% of Spain is considered under-populated, and 53% is at risk of severe depopulation. Spain is divided into 8131 municipios; the lowest level of government. They’re mostly drawn according to local identity rather than population, so the city of Madrid is one huge municipio, as is Valencia. At the same time, 47% of Spain’s municipios contain less than 500 people and only comprise one or two villages. 90% of Spain’s population lives in 30% of its municipios.
Berlanga de Duero, Soria, above, had 2243 inhabitants in 1970. In 2016 it had 923.
The villages are slowly dying. La España Vacía, as the Spanish have called the phenomenon, is most visible in a large area of the north-northeast of the country: the north of the provinces of Guadalajara and Cuenca, the northeast of Segovia, the south of Zaragoza and the provinces of Soria and Teruel. However, having enjoyed hiking and cycling trips into the western reaches of Valencia, I would say it extends further south and towards the coast as well. In Spain, a day’s cycling from Manises can take you from the bustling metropolis to a demographic desert.
Calatañazor is a village in the province of Soria with a history of over 1000 years. Originally a fortified hilltop city, a legendary battle of La Reconquista is said to have taken place here, between Christians and a Moorish army led by their leader Almanzor. The story goes that Almanzor died of wounds he received in the battle. A bust of his head stands near the castle. In 1950, Calatañazor had 306 inhabitants. Today it has 51, many of them very old. The ancient houses, propped up by wooden pillars, are mostly empty.
Above: Calatañazor
Some villages have no-one to call them home. Sárnago, in Soria’s Tierras Altas area, had nearly 500 residents at the beginning of the 20th century, but by 1981 had none. It stayed that way, abandoned, in the middle of the rolling hills of Castilla y Leon, its buildings gradually being swallowed by nature, until 2007, when a few friends with links to the village decided to move back. Now it has a population of 7. These people live among the ruins, doing what they can to stop more of the place from falling down. In an article in El País, one of them, Bonifacio Pérez, in his late 80s, recounts how in the 1950s he worked there as an electrician. His work covered six towns. All of them are now deserted or almost deserted. One of them, Valdenegrillos, has one resident, an octogenarian called Romana. She has lived alone since 2013, when her husband died, without electricity or running water. Now her only visitors are the Guardia Civil, who check up on her once a week. Over the next hill, in Fuentebella, a local filmmaker explores the ruined church, and in a house finds a forgotten letter from 1964, with Franco’s profile on the stamp.
Places like Sárnago and Fuentebella are extreme examples, but for those who have trickled away from Spain’s towns in search of better lives, it is now almost impossible to move back. Spanish cities are today some of the best developed and most convenient in the world, with ample cycle lanes, good public transport and a mix of local shops and chains populating every street, with the result being that most everyday necessities are 5 minutes away or less. In the villages, it’s the opposite story. As populations decline, so do local services. Many under-populated towns lack basic necessities such as banks, schools, doctors, police stations and, most importantly, bars. They are now less liveable than they were before the 60s.
Above: Valdenegrillos, home to one resident.
The Spanish government knows this and is working on projects that will give small towns broadband and allow them to rejig their financing to better suit their needs. There has been talk of incentives for businesses and entrepreneurs who set up shop in these areas. The government is also willing to give a maximum of 10,800€ to anyone under the age of 35 to help buy a house in a municipio with less than 5,000 inhabitants. Things don’t have to be this way - in France, the population of small towns has grown by an average of 1% a year over the last decade.
La España Vacía is also a very beautiful place. Its remoteness and mountainous terrain - the features which make it inhospitable to most industries - are very easy on the eye.
City-dwelling Spaniards, who have long suffered from living in one of the noisiest countries in the world and, possibly because of that, get 53 minutes less sleep per night than the European average, know the value of a holiday somewhere quiet. The population of these tiny towns swells during the summer months, as Spanish families temporarily return to their roots. The occasional epic motorbike tour surely brings in some money too.
Beyond holidays, there has also been a gradual blossoming of interest in the culture of these areas, where time seems to have stood still as the rest of Spain fled its bloody past and rushed headlong into the 21st century, terrified of looking back. Films like Juan Palacios’s Meseta betray a curiosity for these left-behind places, and an urge to preserve Spain’s ancestral memory. But if we don’t take action, then in a couple of decades, films like these may be all that remains.
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