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La España vaciada, and why the word matters
Spain is one of the most urbanised countries in Europe and, at the same time, one of the emptiest. Around half the population lives in a handful of metropolitan areas while more than half of all municipalities have fewer than a thousand inhabitants, and large stretches of the interior — Soria, Teruel, Cuenca, Zamora, much of Castilla and inland Aragón — have population densities comparable to Lapland. Some of it is genuinely among the least densely populated inhabited land in Europe. The word for it changed on purpose, and the change is the point. It used to be called la España vacía, empty Spain, after a much-read book of that title. Campaigners replaced it with la España vaciada — Spain that has been emptied — because the participle assigns responsibility. Nobody chose to be born in a village with no school; they left because the school closed, the bus stopped, the clinic moved to the comarca capital and the bank shut its branch. In 2019 the movement put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Madrid under that banner, and in 2019 and 2023 Teruel Existe — Teruel Exists — elected its own deputies to parliament on it. If you use the phrase in Spain, know that you are using a political one. The mechanics are a loop rather than a mystery. Young people leave for work and study; the birth rate in what remains falls towards nothing; the average age rises; a service closes because too few people use it; its closing removes the reason for the next family to stay. The Alcaldesa's list — internet, a doctor two days a week, somebody to renovate the empty houses — is not sentimental, it is the exact set of conditions under which the loop can run backwards, and every depopulated-Spain programme in the country is some version of it. Two honest complications. The pandemic produced a wave of arrivals from the cities and a great deal of press about it, and the wave was real but much smaller than the headlines, and heavily concentrated in villages within reach of a city. And second-home tourism is not the same as repopulation: a village of restored houses occupied for three weeks in August has its walls saved and its school still shut, which is precisely the distinction in Buscamos familias que quieran quedarse, no que vengan en agosto. A note on how to talk about this, because visitors get it wrong. Calling a dying village idyllic, charming or unspoilt to somebody who lives there is heard roughly the way calling a struggling neighbourhood authentic is heard. The Alcaldesa's Lo bonito no da de comer is the polite version of the correction. Ask what closed and when, ask what would have to happen, and the conversation will go on for hours.