The Disappearing Country Life
Have you got fifty-two thousand euros lying around? Buy yourself a village. You might have to spend a bit more on reforms, though, since a tree is growing through a wall of the largest house. Two hundred forty eight thousand will get you five water mills (four restored), a main house of 700 square meters, two rivers, and 24,000 square meters of woods. All this only nineteen minutes from the city of A Coruña, beaches, and golf course.*
If you don't feel like getting into a fixer-upper, you could spend three hundred eighty-five thousand on a beautiful fortress-palace from the eleventh century, fully furnished, the house consisting of two floors, 250 square meters each, and a meadow that measures 23,000 square meters surrounding the entire house. It's a little bit far from the major cities, though, just outside the town of Lalín, at 47 kilometers from Ourense and 63 from Santiago. It's a steal; it's list price was originally €785,000.*
It's the truth of a problem that is only getting worse with time. Rural Spain is slowly losing population, and the villages being left behind are beginning to disappear. Some go on sale, some dissolve into the greenery surrounding them. Galicia is the region with the most abandoned villages. Since the 1970's the population in rural areas has descended, and has kept descending. It began with a general exodus from the entire region to other places in search of work, leaving the older generations behind. Even when the cities gained population, the smaller towns kept losing. With most of the jobs around the larger cities, families left the villages and didn't return. When the older people died or joined their relatives in the cities, the villages became devoid of life.
That is how the phenomenon of villages for sale began. The last inheritors get together to sell the entire village, and the buyers tend to be foreigners looking to get away from it all, or companies that want to set up the entire village as a rural hotel complex. Near where we wandered in the Courel this month there's an entire village that has become just that. It has capacity for fifty-five people, and its houses and rooms can be rented individually or in their entirety. In low season the rates go from €50 for a room, to €130 for a house with five to six people. It even has a hall for a company to use the village as a working retreat.
Of course, these rehabilitations don't mean that the traditional way of life returns to those stone walls. It just means that the stones end up seeing a different reason of being. The days of families eking a rudimentary living off a hard land have gone. Even in the remaining villages that are lived-in, things have changed. Sometimes heating has been introduced, freezers for the meat and vegetables, satellite-delivered television, internet, and phone service. It doesn't snow as much anymore, either, so the snowbound days of only being able to look out at impenetrable white have gone.
The regional government, the Xunta, praises modern farms and young people who have taken up industrial-type farming as a way of life. They publicly admire those who have returned to the villages to make a living as decent as one made in the cities, and encourage other young people to copy that initiative. Yet, that type of modern farming cannot be applied to every village in the region. It implies large swathes of land and resources that, if divided amongst all the villagers, would stop being modern farming and become the subsistence farming people have run away from. It is not a way to recuperate those villages and that half-forgotten way of life.
One way of keeping people in their ancestral villages would be to create small industrial parks in the more isolated areas, with decent roads leading in and out. Backing that up with good local services, such as decent clinics and good public schools, would help keep families in the area. Otherwise, the village houses will slowly crumble, and the moss-covered stones will be remembered only with a price tag.
* to be found on www.aldeasabandonadas.com.
If you don't feel like getting into a fixer-upper, you could spend three hundred eighty-five thousand on a beautiful fortress-palace from the eleventh century, fully furnished, the house consisting of two floors, 250 square meters each, and a meadow that measures 23,000 square meters surrounding the entire house. It's a little bit far from the major cities, though, just outside the town of Lalín, at 47 kilometers from Ourense and 63 from Santiago. It's a steal; it's list price was originally €785,000.*
It's the truth of a problem that is only getting worse with time. Rural Spain is slowly losing population, and the villages being left behind are beginning to disappear. Some go on sale, some dissolve into the greenery surrounding them. Galicia is the region with the most abandoned villages. Since the 1970's the population in rural areas has descended, and has kept descending. It began with a general exodus from the entire region to other places in search of work, leaving the older generations behind. Even when the cities gained population, the smaller towns kept losing. With most of the jobs around the larger cities, families left the villages and didn't return. When the older people died or joined their relatives in the cities, the villages became devoid of life.
That is how the phenomenon of villages for sale began. The last inheritors get together to sell the entire village, and the buyers tend to be foreigners looking to get away from it all, or companies that want to set up the entire village as a rural hotel complex. Near where we wandered in the Courel this month there's an entire village that has become just that. It has capacity for fifty-five people, and its houses and rooms can be rented individually or in their entirety. In low season the rates go from €50 for a room, to €130 for a house with five to six people. It even has a hall for a company to use the village as a working retreat.
Of course, these rehabilitations don't mean that the traditional way of life returns to those stone walls. It just means that the stones end up seeing a different reason of being. The days of families eking a rudimentary living off a hard land have gone. Even in the remaining villages that are lived-in, things have changed. Sometimes heating has been introduced, freezers for the meat and vegetables, satellite-delivered television, internet, and phone service. It doesn't snow as much anymore, either, so the snowbound days of only being able to look out at impenetrable white have gone.
The regional government, the Xunta, praises modern farms and young people who have taken up industrial-type farming as a way of life. They publicly admire those who have returned to the villages to make a living as decent as one made in the cities, and encourage other young people to copy that initiative. Yet, that type of modern farming cannot be applied to every village in the region. It implies large swathes of land and resources that, if divided amongst all the villagers, would stop being modern farming and become the subsistence farming people have run away from. It is not a way to recuperate those villages and that half-forgotten way of life.
One way of keeping people in their ancestral villages would be to create small industrial parks in the more isolated areas, with decent roads leading in and out. Backing that up with good local services, such as decent clinics and good public schools, would help keep families in the area. Otherwise, the village houses will slowly crumble, and the moss-covered stones will be remembered only with a price tag.
* to be found on www.aldeasabandonadas.com.
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