STORY: Rural towns in "Empty Spain" regions face severe depopulation
SHOOTING TIME: Aug. 27, 2024
DATELINE: Aug. 29, 2024
LENGTH: 00:02:07
LOCATION: BARCELONA, Spain
CATEGORY: SOCIETY

SHOTLIST:
1. various of people in the center of Barcelona
2. various of Spain
3. SOUNDBITE 1 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies
4. various of crowds on city streets
5. SOUNDBITE 2 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies
6. various of crowds on city streets and sparsely populated village
7. SOUNDBITE 3 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies

STORYLINE:

Around half of Spain's towns are seeing declining populations, with many at risk of "extinction" in terms of the number of inhabitants, according to researchers in Barcelona.

The United Nations has been warning of the phenomenon of urban concentration for some time. Although Spain's population surpassed 48 million for the first time in 2023, in the so-called "Espana vacia (Empty Spain)" regions, over 4,000 Spanish municipalities, about half of the total, have seen falling populations.

Meanwhile, 1,840 localities are considered rural areas at risk of irreversible depopulation, according to experts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

The term "Empty Spain" refers to the agricultural-reliant regions in the vast interior of Spain that have suffered massive emigrations during the rural exodus of the 1950s and 1960s.

The towns most at risk of hollowing out of population have an average of 110 inhabitants, and very low population densities (an average of 4.3 inhabitants per square km), while the average age of inhabitants is close to 60.

SOUNDBITE 1 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies
"As no one new is moving there, the effect is that depopulation is being accentuated, and this loss of population probably means that in the next 10 to 30 years a lot of these municipalities will disappear, you could say, in terms of the number of inhabitants."

According to Spain's Ministry for Territorial Policy, 90 percent of the country's population lives in 1,500 towns and cities occupying 30 percent of the land, while the other 10 percent are distributed across the remaining 70 percent of the territory.

SOUNDBITE 2 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies
"This issue has now become pressing, but the seed of what is now really becoming noticeable in the declining population figures was planted 40 or 50 years ago."

SOUNDBITE 3 (Catalan): ALBERT ESTEVE, Director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies
"The origin of this population decline is in the rural migrations in the mid-20th century when a lot of people left, and while those who stayed were relatively young, these once young people are now getting older, and logically as you get older, you are closer to dying, and these people are now beginning to die."

In August, Spain's National Institute of Statistics (INE) published the country's birth figures, confirming that this year, most babies were born in populated areas such as Madrid (25,936) and Barcelona (19,411). Meanwhile, the fewest births were registered in rural places such as Soria (242) and Zamora (350).

This phenomenon affects rural regions all over the country, especially Castilla y Leon, Asturias and Galicia in the northwest, Castilla-La Mancha in central Spain, Extremadura in the west, Rioja in the north, and Andalusia in the south.

Xinhua News Agency correspondents reporting from Barcelona, Spain.
(XHTV)