This weekend JJ Madueño was talking to us about Cartajima, a beautiful town in Malaga where no births have been recorded for seven years. This is not a record in empty Spain. All it takes is a little searching to discover Ledigos (Palencia, child-free for 20 years), Gatón de Campos (Valladolid, 57 years old) or Valcuence (León, 64).

However, it is still intriguing because, unlike the other examples I gave, the province of Malaga is one of the fastest growing provinces in the country.

X-ray of a small town. The report speaks for itself: “There are no bank branches, no ATMs, no shops and the bars are municipal concessions that do not always open. […] “The pharmacy doesn’t have many pediatric products, and the doctor only comes in for an hour and a half every day.”

For practical purposes, everything outside Cartajima is connected to Ronda, which is 19 kilometers and 20 minutes away by car. The school is still open but has only seven children. And despite repopulation plans, aid to families and tourist-cultural initiatives, all efforts seem few and inadequate.

Depopulation worm. And as I said, this shows that the problem of evacuated Spain is much more complex (and insidious) than we usually think. It does not only affect the inner provinces as we thought due to stereotypical thinking. It’s nothing. The same structural problems also affect numerous regions that are “distant” from today’s major socioeconomic poles due to the country’s variable orographic relief.

It’s a global problem. There is a long history of depopulation in Spain, and its most visible effects are clear (60% of municipalities have a population of less than 1,000, occupying 40% of the territory and concentrating 3.1% of the population).

In fact, there are many studies analyzing how the migration of young people, the “drastic decline in local marriage markets” and the decline in birth rates (masked by a strong demographic inertia) caused empty Spain to almost unwittingly lose its future. . bill.

However, on a global level this is a relatively new phenomenon; Something that has been worrying us lately. The point is that cases like Cartajima appear as ‘advances’ of a deeply global phenomenon: a world being evacuated for the first time in history, and the countryside bearing the brunt since the 1950s. .

And that’s not the worst part. Worse still, as László J. Kulcsár notes, “demography has always been a central component in our understanding of economic growth and social well-being.” If we cannot separate these two things, the “empty world” is much more than a population curiosity, it is the promise of a worse future.

The big question is obvious: Can we maintain a good quality of life in a world where the economy is rapidly declining? In finding ways to decouple demography and economics, two key intervention strategies fail. We can neither stop the decline in fertility nor bet on migration. Firstly, because we do not know how to do it, and secondly, the period of great migrations is coming to an end.

So, although certain facts may mislead us, the world is nothing more than an expanded version of Cartajima. And so, places like these are the great laboratories of the second demographic transition: places where we will test our ability to sustain quality of life, economic growth, and equality of opportunity despite the massive demographic decline they are experiencing. .

It won’t be easy, but (from what we’ve seen) there aren’t many other options.

Image | Donnie Ray Jones

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