Melancholy over the decline of their town is no longer the exclusive heritage of the last residents of small towns. The depopulation has already reached the county capitals, even many of the provinces of the interior of Spain.
Sold out already fishing grounds of inhabitants who came to them from the towns and who no longer give up, the capitals of the interior cannot stand the claw of the macrocities.
The demographic decline of important populations is especially noticeable in provinces such as those of Asturias, Jaen or Albacete. There, from 2008 to 2018, nine of its ten largest municipalities have lost inhabitants. In four provinces of Castilla y León (Avila, Burgos, Soria and Zamora) and in TeruelEight of the ten largest towns have also declined in that decade.
Faced with that reality, Madrid, Barcelona and although unevenly, the mediterranean coast they reveal themselves as great poles of attraction that extend their reach farther and farther from their traditional zones of influence. The 10 largest municipalities of Barcelona and Almeria have grown since 2008. The same occurs in the nine largest of the coastal provinces of Gipuzkoa, Huelva, Malaga or Las palmas, and only in an indoor one, Guadalajara, which benefits from its proximity to Madrid.
The Commissioner for the Government for the Demographic Challenge, Isaura Leal, appreciates a “very intense” wave of population movement, as happened in the sixties with the rural exodus for work of the peoples to Madrid. “Most people who move seek better living conditions, equal opportunities and employment,” describes the expert.
“You always think of rural decline, but if you look at many of those intermediate cities, you see how its population declines in a similar way to rural areas,” says Diego Ramiro Fariñas, head of the Population Department of the Institute of Economy, Geography and Demography of the CSIC. “The first thing that we demographers detected was rural depopulation, but the next to fall are the intermediate cities, former county centers. Then, it is the turn of the medium-sized cities,” says the expert.
“The first thing we saw was the rural depopulation, but the next to fall are the intermediate cities, former county centers. Then it will be the turn of medium-sized cities ”
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What do these depleted cities have in common, beyond seeing how their collective self-esteem suffers? Although neither the intensity with which they decrease nor why they are the same in each case, they usually share a recipe that includes three demographic ingredients. First: low fertility, because young people who leave take away the children they have already had (and they are fewer and fewer) and because it will also be outside where those who have are born. Second: an increase in mortality, because those who stay are the oldest. Third: the exit of immigrants who lived in these localities, on average more fertile and who, without ties to any land, are more likely to change residence than their Spanish neighbors.
The county seats and the provincial capitals were involuntary allies against rural depopulation. They retained population: the demographic tear was appeased by the metropolitan crowns that were born around the cities at the dawn of the construction bubble. But that is no longer happening in provinces like those of Burgos, Palencia, León, Jaén, Zamora or Salamanca, in which the population of the capital, its area and its province are declining: “The capital of Salamanca began to lose population because people bought a cheaper house in the surroundings. That crown grew for a few years, but now people are leaving, and it is already outside the province “, describes the professor at the University of Salamanca José Ignacio Plaza, an expert in geographic analysis. In many other cases, the decline in the population of capitals such as Cadiz, Vigo or Pomegranate it continues to coexist with the rise in inhabitants of its metropolitan areas. It is above all the metropolitan areas of large cities, such as Madrid or Barcelona, that have driven several of their municipalities to grow above 50% in just 10 years.
Loss of aura
With the departure of the inhabitants, an aura also disappears: the ability to convey that a city is a good place to live and prosper. It is seen how investments, infrastructures and political representation escape (for example, the number of councilors of the Town Halls). The neighborhoods are emptying and aging. Shops are closed and there are more empty houses. “There is a social downturn and urban dynamics, although everything depends on each case, which contributes to creating a depressing, regressive landscape,” says Plaza. Even the perception of prosperity of a site is artificially altered: “When we are told that these small cities have a development index equal to or greater than years ago, we do not realize that this is only because now those who are left are less to distribute” .
Roads and the obligation to travel far have been part of the rest: “More and more people of productive age are willing to go miles and miles to go to work, and this is affecting small cities that are close to other medium-sized and great, “says professor emeritus of the University of Léon Lorenzo López Trigal. Many inland towns experienced a peak in population between the 1940s and 1960s, then stagnated and then began to see their population reduced. López Trigal has studied the case of Astorga (León), where one in ten registered voters has disappeared from those he had when the new century arrived, with no possible competition with nearby León or the most distant Ponferrada, which they now also see how their urban areas lose population.
“People from the old area of influence are no longer arriving at Astorga. They are going to León, Madrid or abroad,” says López Trigal, who reflects on the case of smaller towns, such as Puebla de Sanabria (Zamora). , a whole head of the region with its little more than 1,400 inhabitants, but which have not stopped falling in recent years. “When not only the population of the region decreases, but also the headwaters, we are in the final cycle of demographic loss. If a center of attraction and functionality, of shops and services is lost, the entire territory collapses,” aim. In these small cities the population decline and the typical functions of a city go hand in hand: commerce, services or cultural life.
“Cities will compete with each other to see which one attracts more people”
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López Trigal calculates that a third of the population between 25 and 40 years of inland Spain has migrated outside that wide area of geography, especially to large cities (“Madrid and to a much lesser extent Barcelona”) or abroad.
“The cities have lost the attraction capacity they had, which was never great, but at least they captured labor for construction and to attend to public services, such as health or universities,” Antonio Pérez describes for the case of Extremadura. Díaz, professor of regional geographic analysis at the Extremaduran university. Except for the capital, Mérida, and the most populous city, Badajoz, the other 11 municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants are in a clear recession. In nine of those Extremaduran cities more people are going outside than arriving. The prospects do not give hope for the coming years either. The Extremadura Institute of Statistics foresees that Cáceres or the region of Tierra de Barros will decrease the population and that the one that remains, is older. The Institute It is one of the rare demographic entities that dares to make prospective of a territory inferior to the province, because the population is subject to conjunctural changes that alter the accounts for many years to come.
More and more municipalities are almost empty
The Catalan political crisis is not the only one that questions the structure of the State. The nineteenth division into provinces and the creation of autonomies from the late seventies and early eighties left several experts unattended, the intermediate scale, that of the interior territories. “The territory should have been articulated in a functional way, to meet the needs of the population that was distributed in those areas, and it has not been done,” he points out. Jose Ignacio Square. “Those regional centers should have taken care of the basic services: education, health, and social services, so that not everything was concentrated in the provincial or autonomous capital.” Joaquín Recaño, demographer of the Demographic Studies Center in Barcelona, he urges to tackle a tricky question: there are too many municipalities: “There are many that are unviable from a demographic point of view, but, at the same time, you have to think about the people who live in those places and the services that are available to lend them. “
The interactive graphics that illustrate this report show the territorial imbalance in Spain. 7.5 million inhabitants live in six large municipalities, while 1,355 of the smallest barely add up to 75,000 people as a whole. In other words: in 16% of the municipalities, those that do not reach 100 inhabitants, only 0.2% of the population of Spain lives. Julián Mora, a doctor in sociology and spatial planning, describes the country as “a great demographic desert between mountains and cereal plains or pasturelands, and dotted with oases of relative strength, the cities, from the 249 little ones (the cities between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants) to the 16 large cities (over 250,000) of which only six exceed half a million “.
Even lower fertility
An imaginary diagonal crosses the map of Spain from the Pyrenees to Huelva crossing Madrid. Professor Joaquín Recaño draws it. From the line to the north and west, fertility is “very low”. “In some places it is already below the child per woman, as in Galicia, Asturias and Castilla-León. The minimum rate to ensure the replacement of one generation by the next is 2.1 children per woman; the Spanish average is around 1.3.
Across the line, east and south, the situation is different. Fertility remains low, but not so low, encouraged at certain points by the good economic situation. “In some moments before the crisis, fertility was higher in Catalonia than in Andalusia”, describes the expert, who uses Sant Cugat del Vallès (Barcelona) as an example of a fertile site, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants that has grown a spectacular 72% since 2000, and enjoying one of the highest income levels in Spain. “It is a place where families who want to have children want to live,” concludes Joaquín Recaño.
The 2008 crisis hit fertility squarely, but another demographic one has been added to that economic debacle: not only Fewer children are born, but there are fewer and fewer women of childbearing age. “In the last 10 years we have seen the number of women of childbearing age have decreased. Those born since the early 1960s to the mid-1970s[alargepopulationgroupofthegenerationof[ungrupodepoblaciónnumerosodelageneracióndelbaby boom] it is already outside its fertile ages in most cases, “Recaño describes. Despite the economic recovery and a slight rise in fertility, current low wages delay the decision to partner and have children.
Furthermore, until the arrival of the crisis, small cities had benefited from immigration in the demographic balance, but it was greatly reduced when the opportunities ended. “We also see that in many places more Spaniards are being lost than foreigners, for the simple reason that the remaining Spaniards are older and die,” Recaño illustrates. Spaniards are not only older on average, they change residence less than foreigners. Spain and Italy are at the lowest levels of mobility in the entire continent, although employment increased last year. “Immigrants have fixed the patches mobility: they are those who move to occupy the niches that remain deserted in agriculture, hospitality and care for the elderly, “describes the researcher, an expert in this specific field of demography. Immigrants should be one in four changes of residence that there was in Spain between 2001 and 2005.
“The hypermobility of the foreign population is what has maintained the flows between autonomous communities, not the old interregional ones [por ejemplo, de regiones del sur al norte y noreste], who are in the doldrums. “Outside of this dynamic, the only” interesting “flow of internal emigration within Spain, according to Recaño, is that of young university students from the interior to the cities.
Spain prepares a National Strategy against the Demographic Challenge that will be presented, if the announced is fulfilled, next spring. Commissioner Isaura Leal believes that the strengths of these medium-sized cities must be consolidated, whether or not they lose population. “We must provide them with opportunities, which are for the entire territory of their area of incidence; also good provision of basic services and equal opportunities, so that the rights of citizens are effective, not just nominal, for all, no matter where they live. ” In this objective, he points out, the participation of all administrations, the EU, and also the private sector will be necessary. Setting population is also important to avoid, considers responsible, the excessive concentration of population in a few points. “The large megalopolises create a huge gap of inequality and social and economic tension.”
The blurry boundary between small town and big town
“Small towns are not being studied very much.” There is no definition in Spain and that makes analysis difficult, points out Dolores Sánchez Aguilera, president of the Population Geography group of the Association of Spanish Geographers. “To consider a city or not a city depends a lot on the area: a small city is not the same in the interior of Catalonia or in the province of Burgos, where a city could be considered as such with a very small number of inhabitants, than a municipality with more inhabitants in a metropolitan environment. A unique definition is missing because what gives meaning to a city are its functions, services, commerce… ”. Sánchez Aguilera sets the example of large populations in the metropolitan environment. “You can have a municipality with enough inhabitants but with a mere residential function (bedroom), while in the province of Teruel or in Castilla y León Municipalities with very little population have urban functions, as they are the head of their environment. It should not be equated. “
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Strict remarketing is not, experts say, a panacea. “It is not so much about recovering the old regions, but rather more adapted models to the current reality of the territory and how it is organized”, adventure José Ignacio Plaza. Communities such as Aragon and Catalonia have a regionalization model, and in Galicia it is pending its implementation. “It is not necessary to create an added level of Administration, with more expenses, but to establish subprovincial units. In many provinces there is an excessive concentration of activity in the provincial capital.”
Scotland, a positive example
Many in depopulated Spain look with envy at the rare case of the Scottish Highlands. Investments sustained over decades in accommodation, tax benefits, restocking policies, good internet connectivity and a commitment to tourism are some of the measures applied to ensure that the remote region recovers population for their own joy and encouragement for strangers, such as politicians and businessmen from communities that lose people. Those from Teruel or Cuenca sent a delegation to Scotland to learn about their good practices. Population growth in the area has doubled that of Scotland from 1996 to 2016. One of the cities hardest hit by population decline in the past, northern Inverness, has gone from around 47,000 inhabitants in 2000 to close to 64,000 in 2016.
In Spain there is no reason to think about such relief in the medium term. “The general trend of the demographic structure is negative. The only thing that could help would be immigration, but on a planetary scale, we are already seeing it, these are not good times for mobility,” says Joaquín Recaño. From the CSIC, Diego Ramiro Fariñas advances a panorama today unheard of: “Cities will compete with each other to see how to attract more people.”
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