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A demographic shift has left the Spanish countryside with hundreds of ghost villages, telling tales of people like Gustavo Iglesias.
Iglesias, like others in the hamlet of Acorrada in the northern Spanish region of Galicia, moved to a larger town for work, leaving behind a village with six gray-stone houses and two horreos, or grain stores, overlooking a lush valley. His family had lived there for generations, growing wheat and tending to cows, but by the time his father died about 30 years ago, it had emptied out, abandoned and left to crumble.
Now, the 57-year old—who works as a port policeman in Burela, a fishing town on the Galician coast—has joined with other owners to put the hamlet up for sale, trying to give it a new life. The asking price? Just 85,000 euros, or $96,000.
“I’d like someone to buy it and do it up so that it continues to have a life,” said Iglesias.
Spain’s countryside is dotted with hamlets like Iglesias’s that are being sold after their owners abandoned them. For the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who made the reversal of rural depopulation a key policy issue when he came to power last year, such efforts can help stem rural desertification before it tips into crisis territory. Sanchez, who faces a general election in April, will on Friday discuss with his cabinet measures to reverse the trend.
“We need to be aware of the demographic winter that threatens a large part of our territory,” he said at a forum on Tuesday. “Half of Spain’s municipalities have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, and a large part of our territory is at risk of depopulation.”
Adventurous foreigners and enterprising Spaniards are starting to be seen as part of the solution as they buy some of the hamlets, taking advantage of bargain prices. Aldeas Abandonadas, an estate agency specializing in such sales, last year sold about 40 villages, with foreign buyers accounting for 90 percent of the transactions. The company recently got a boost after Gwyneth Paltrow flagged one of its villages on her website as a good Christmas present.
“People are coming from all over the world to buy,” said Pepe Rodil, a manager at the agency, who pointed to the area’s famous food—octopus, scallops, and clams as well as heavy winter bean broths with chorizo and pork and chorizo in cider—as a draw for potential buyers of hamlets like Iglesias’s.
Not Enough Babies
There are about 1,500 abandoned hamlets in Spain, said Elvira Fafian, the founder of Aldeas Abandonadas. An increasing number of them are being put on the block since local councils require owners to maintain their properties, which many can’t afford to do. The ghost-village phenomenon is likely to grow, she said.