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Peace at a Price

ONE of the great attractions of living in Madrid is waiting in traffic jams in tunnels. Last week, sitting motionless in the one next to the Atocha railway station among the fumes, the anger and the tooting horns, my mind naturally drifted to possibly the most peaceful spot in Spain.

A few years ago I was taken to an abandoned village in the province of Lugo in Galicia, a couple of miles from a small village, Santo Tomé, which will probably itself be abandoned before too long. The last inhabitants had left a year earlier. Many of the houses were still intact, and signs of life – sofas, tables, even a TV set – were still visible. The birds and insects had taken over, and the sensation of tranquility as I looked out over a magnificent, green valley was enhanced by the knowledge that my surroundings had once been buzzing with life.

Spain is full of such abandoned villages: a 2006 report by the National Statistics Institute reported there were 2,648 of them, and if you’ve ever undertaken a lengthy journey by car through the country, you’ve probably passed by several. They are all listed on the institute’s website – a seemingly endless list of villages with a population of less than one person.

The country’s éxodo rural (rural exodus), as it is known, started in the 1960s, when people moved away from the countryside, mainly to Barcelona, Madrid and the Basque Country, but also abroad to Europe, in search of work. The lack of leisure facilities, the collapse of traditional agricultural and mining jobs, school closures and a lack of business opportunities are also playing a part in this mass emigration to the cities. A telling example: the province of Soria has lost 42% of its population in the last 50 years and Soria now has 8.8 inhabitants per square km (compared to an average of 82.7 in Spain and 116 in Europe). This population density is similar to that of Arctic Sweden or Finland, making it the least densely-populated area in the European Union. (I told a Sorian friend about this and his response – he is something of a misanthrope – was: “That’s great news.” But it isn’t.

An overwhelming percentage of Spaniards now live in the cities, and though tentative measures are being taken to repopulate some of the villages, people are unlikely ever to drift back again. With the loss of the villages comes the loss of traditional cultures and of ways of seeing the world, which is why the peacefulness I felt on my visit to the abandoned village in Vigo was, in reality, the sad peacefulness of permanent loss.

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