Learning to embrace outsiders
The town of Olmeda de la Cuesta boasted 500 residents in the 1980s, but only a handful remain.
Olmeda de la Cuesta, a tiny town 160 kilometres east of Madrid, is home to just 35 aging residents. With an average age of 75, their village has the oldest population in Spain and it’s growing smaller each year. Many houses are in ruins.
Last year, in a bid to stave off its slow demise, Mayor Jose Luis Regacho hatched a bold plan. He would try attracting new blood by selling plots of land for as little as $250.
It was an enticing bargain with just one obligation: Buyers had to agree to build a house or business on the land within 21⁄ years.
2 “Without this, my town is going to disappear,” Regacho says of his scheme.
Across Spain, thousands more communities are also battling to stave off extinction, exacerbated by the bursting of a housing bubble in 2008 that plunged the country into recession. Unemployment remains at more than 23 per cent with close to six million unemployed.
Regacho admits joblessness remains a major sticking point in his plan. “People have written to me saying: ‘We have two children, we’re going to build a house and then look for work,’ ” he says. “But we don’t have enough work for the people who are there now.”
Nevertheless, the mayor says his low-priced plots of land are perfect for artists, families looking for cheap vacation homes and online entrepreneurs — once he gets the Wi-Fi up and running, that is.
Around 400 kilometres south in the Alicante province, the bustling town of San Fulgencio paints a different picture. With almost 80 per cent of its13,000 residents foreign-born — mostly Britons and Germans — it’s been named Spain’s foreign capital again this year.
But the influx has brought its own problems, with the town divided in half both geographically and sociologically. Spaniards live below in the former old part of town, while foreigners live higher up in massive residential housing estates.
The two communities are almost entirely segregated, says Mayor Carlos Ramirez, 43.
“There is no real integration,” he told El Pais in August. “This used to be a small village of farmers with one local policeman who was blind in one eye, and suddenly a giant company descended on the village and began building thousands of homes on some land located three kilometres from the centre, connected by a badly paved road. This physical barrier, together with the language issue, did the rest. They lead their own separate lives, and have over 200 establishments of their own.”
Although there are more deaths than births in this town, new retirees arrive each year to fill the gap.
A Senate commission is currently looking into the problem of depopulation. But with Spain’s birth rate continuing to fall, immigration may be the only solution, at least for now.
Luckily, attracting foreigners to Spain, especially the sun-drenched south, has never been a problem.
“I think that’s why everybody comes here,” says Angela Sutcliffe, who manages the Lounge Restaurant and Bar in San Fulgencio. “You just feel better when you wake up and it’s sunny.”