Juan Ansotegui walks on his property in Villalibado, a hamlet in the Odra-Pisuerga comarca of Burgos, Castilla y León in Spain. Photo / Ana Maria Arévalo Gosen, Bloomberg via The Washington Post
Driving through Castilla y León in the northwest of Spain can create the impression of being alone in the world.
The landscape is a continuous scroll of wheat fields, dry grasslands and expanses of yellow sunflowers punctuated by the occasional village; often no more than several run-down stone houses surrounding a church.
With public transportation out of reach in these areas, and the distances between towns too great to walk, the only option is to travel by car.
Sparsely populated regions like these are so common that they’ve earned their own nickname – “España Vacía,” or “Empty Spain”.
While the country’s rural areas began thinning out in the mid-20th century, when factory jobs drew workers to cities, depopulation has accelerated in recent years, and particularly in the northwest.
A lack of jobs and cultural offerings, combined with poor infrastructure and housing stock, have helped fuel the exodus.
Spain’s rural areas saw a 4.4% population decline between 2014 and 2023, according to a government report, even as the country’s overall population grew by 2.6%.
“In Spain, hundreds of villages are going to disappear due to a lack of younger people who want to make a life there,” said Juan José Manzano, co-founder of the rural revitalisation organisation AlmaNatura.
While 84% of Spain’s territory is rural, only 16% of people live outside cities.
Population density maps show vibrant clusters around the coastline and big cities, and empty stretches across the country’s interior.
This has contributed to fears that smaller towns and villages – as well as their centuries’-old histories, traditions, and cultures – may eventually vanish.
With fewer people around to maintain forests and vegetation, it also makes wildfire-prone regions even more vulnerable.
To save these areas, public and private actors are experimenting with ways to reverse demographic decline, and the Government even has a ministry focused on the issue. At the same time, the stresses of cities are persuading more people to consider life in the countryside.
Among the businesses catering to a more affluent demographic is Aldeas Abandonadas, a Spanish real estate agency that specialises in the sale of rural hamlets and villages.
Recently, the company, which usually handles between six and seven contracts a year, has seen a rise in demand from foreigners and young people seeking to avoid high mortgages or simply relocate somewhere “peaceful and affordable”, said its president, Elvira Fafian.
Last year, the agency sold a rural town situated 40km from the city of Burgos in Castilla y León to a Dutch couple for €350,000 ($690,000).
The new owners of Bárcena de Bureba, a mathematician and computer scientist, plan to transform the town into an eco-village with a sustainability focus. They’ll start by renovating four of the town’s 62 houses, and hope that more people will eventually join with their own projects.
“We wanted to do something good with our money,” explained Maaike Geurts, the mathematician. “And not sit in front of our computers our entire lives.”
When Juan Ansótegui and his brothers purchased Villalibado in 2007, he never imagined the town would become a tourist attraction.
“Originally, the plan was just to build a few houses, a small retirement complex,” Ansótegui recalls. “But little by little, we got more ambitious.”
Located 30 minutes outside of Burgos, Villalibado had been abandoned for over three decades when the Ansóteguis bought most of its remaining structures.
That included a handful of houses and a 12th-century Romanesque church.
Over the years, the brothers restored most of the homes and built two swimming pools, a restaurant and bar and other amenities.
They landscaped the grounds and outfitted the village to run on solar and geothermal energy.
Now, it’s a popular destination for weddings, retreats, and big family gatherings. A group of scientists from San Francisco recently rented out part of the village next year to view a solar eclipse.
While most residents are seasonal, a steady flow of visitors keeps Villalibado active year-round.
“We are so happy to see the town alive again,” said Alonso Manjón, the Mayor. “It has also motivated us to maintain our own properties and carry out new projects.”
Its success has had spillover effects on neighbouring Villadiego, a 1500-person town and municipality located 4km away.
Ángel Carretón Castrillo, Mayor-President of the Villadiego City Council, says Ansótegui’s project has been “like winning the lottery”.
Visitors from Villalibado come to buy produce, visit the six local museums, and spend time in its cafes and bars.
As the larger town, Villadiego acts as an administrative centre for its neighbour, offering banks, schools, childcare and healthcare that would otherwise not be easily accessible.
“Without good services to offer,” said Carretón Castrillo, “you stand little chance of attracting and getting people to stay.”
The town still struggles to retain residents, yet there have been some new arrivals. Celia, a museum guide in her late 20s, moved from Madrid to Villadiego in search of a quieter life.
“It just wasn’t for me,” she said of the capital. Six years later, she has no plans to leave.
Like Villalibado, Villadiego comes alive in the high season. In contrast to most rural towns, where the demographics skew older, Villadiego was thrumming with children accompanied by grandparents and parents.
Families shared meals in the main square. Young people in their 20s and 30s lounged with drinks and cigarettes, discussing their plans for the rest of the summer.
But as Villalibado and Villadiego chart new courses, a cautionary tale is hidden in the wheat fields just 6km away.
Villamorón was once a 150-person village boasting the Church of Santiago Apóstol, among the earliest Gothic-style churches in the province of Burgos.
Now, its homes and small cemetery have been abandoned to nature, and the town could almost pass unnoticed were it not for the church.
Ricardo Padín and his family moved to Spain last September to escape difficult conditions in their native Venezuela.
They first set themselves up near relatives in Alicante but knew they wanted to live in the countryside. While watching YouTube one day, Padín, an artisanal knifemaker, came across a video about HolaPueblo, an initiative run by the AlmaNatura organisation that helps small-time entrepreneurs move to depopulated villages.
Between 2020 and 2025, HolaPueblo has helped 85 families resettle across Spain, resulting in 58 new bakeries, bars, art studios and other businesses. The Padíns are now among them.
“Since I arrived in Spain, my greatest wish was to settle in Galicia, since it is the land where my grandparents were born,” Padín explained.
Two months ago, the family moved to Placín, a town with fewer than 200 inhabitants surrounded by mountains in Galicia’s Ourense province. They found a rental house with a workshop where Padín can forge knives, and already know all their neighbours.
There are challenges, he acknowledged. Buying groceries and other essentials requires travelling to a nearby village, and their son’s secondary school is several towns away.
Padín also makes TikTok and Instagram videos to promote his business, and he’s struggled with reliable internet access. “The main drawback is that fibre optic internet doesn’t reach Placín,” he explained, adding that he had to drive out of town to upload his videos.
HolaPueblo is one of a growing number of initiatives focused on rural revitalisation.
Its organisers don’t collect economic data, but Manzano, the co-founder, notes that the arrival of new families in rural areas generates “immediate economic activity” through home purchases and spending at local businesses and often sets off a “virtuous cycle” that draws more newcomers over time.
There are signs that depopulation in areas like Galicia and Castilla y León is starting to slow.
While the overall number of deaths still outpace births, a 2019 study by La Caixa Foundation’s Social Observatory found that a “generational renewal” is starting to take place.
In municipalities with fewer than 10,000 residents, the study found that nearly 10% were born abroad, and that most were between the ages of 20 and 39.
While individual efforts to revitalise Spain’s towns and villages can have local impact, experts like Miguel González-Leonardo, an independent researcher on population studies, say that structural measures are the only way to catalyse greater change.
Some are slowly being enacted: at the government level, authorities in some regions offer grants, subsidies and tax deductions to incentivise people to move there.
In Andalucia, financial support is available to anybody interested in purchasing a home in a village with fewer than 3000 inhabitants, and on a national scale, the Government allocated €10 billion in 2021 to combat depopulation.
While it’s too soon to say whether these policies have made an impact, they’re relatively small-scale, and González-Leonardo doesn’t expect any dramatic reversals.
“Within a few years,” he said of underpopulated areas, “some of these municipalities will likely disappear. There’s no economic activity, and there aren’t many policies or resources that can realistically be leveraged.”
At the same time, as more attention is focused on regions that have long been overlooked, people are starting to take a deeper interest in life outside cities.
“People come to visit every day: tourists, curious travellers. It’s generating real interest,” Ansótegui said of his own small town.
“It’s incredible to see how an abandoned village can be transformed into a tourist destination that attracts people from all over the world.”
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