Una llamada de la sierra — A Call from the Hills

Bringing people back: the families who move to the village

The Alcaldesa's three families are typical of a small but real movement. Since the pandemic, a number of households, many with remote jobs, have moved from Madrid, Barcelona and other cities to villages in the depopulated interior, and some local councils have organized themselves to attract them. The obstacle she names is the one most of them cite: not jobs, not even services, but housing. Villages that have lost most of their population are full of empty houses, yet very few are on the market. Many belong to heirs living elsewhere who are reluctant to sell a family home, and some have been divided among so many inheritors that nobody can sell. Others are habitable only on paper, needing a new roof, plumbing or wiring before anyone can live in them. That is why the Alcaldesa distinguishes a casa habitable from a casa digna: a house you could survive in is not a house a family will choose. The responses are local and practical. Some councils keep registers of empty homes and contact owners directly, as Cierzo is doing in Guadalajara. Some act as intermediaries, guaranteeing rents or managing renovations in exchange for a period of social rent. Provincial councils and regional governments, often with European rural development money, fund studies and small grants of exactly the kind she describes, modest sums that cover a diagnosis and some of the works. Cooperatives, the cheese, wine or olive oil cooperative that is often the last employer in a district, sometimes take part, because new residents are also potential workers. None of this reverses depopulation on its own. But a village of twelve that becomes a village of twenty-two with five children can reopen a school, and that is the arithmetic Alex was talking about in lesson 90.