‘It's all over': The fight to revive Europe's shrinking rural areas

Irish Times

5 days ago

Nicolás de la Fuente, a 92-year-old walking his dog on the desolate streets of Molezuelas de la Carballeda, remembers the Spanish village's heyday as a flourishing farming community. 'We had everything,' he recalls. 'There were five herds of 500 sheep each. There were two herds of 600 goats. There were cows, 200 or 300. And horses and chickens.'
But the era of pastoral abundance is long gone. Commercial activity has virtually disappeared. This remote village of stone walls and unlocked doors has become an economic desert. The average age of its 47 residents has climbed to 70, making it the oldest municipality in Zamora, a northwestern province at the heart of the so-called 'emptied Spain' or
España vaciada
. 'Now there's nothing,' says de la Fuente. 'It's all over.'
Rural depopulation has long been an issue in parts of southern and eastern Europe. But the trend is becoming an existential threat for many places and it is spreading across the continent, leaving no country unaffected. While rural areas that are well connected to towns and cities are doing better – particularly after the pandemic, which triggered a desire for more green space – the most remote areas are struggling.
In the decade to 2024, the estimated number of people living in predominantly rural EU regions fell by nearly 8 million, an 8.3 per cent drop, while the urban population rose by over 10 million, or 6 per cent. Regions making up about 40 per cent of the EU's land area and containing almost one-third of its population are experiencing a sustained drop in residents.
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Abandoned houses in the Spanish village of Burbaguena, near Teruel. Photo by Josep Lago/ AFP
Dwindling numbers mean shops and bars are forced to close, buses run less frequently, doctors are harder to find, and classrooms become emptier. This fuels further departures, in what the OECD describes as a vicious cycle.
'Citizens should be equal, but those in rural areas are paying the price with poorer services, higher costs and fewer opportunities,' says Raffaella Mariani, the mayor of a municipality in Garfagnana, an area of Tuscany, Italy.
This is not simply a concern for those left behind in the emptying rural communities, says Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, director at the OECD's Centre for Regions and Cities. Depopulation threatens Europe's cultural heritage, local languages, cuisines, crafts, farmland, traditions and even national security. Maintaining the municipalities in Garfagnana 'protects the cities below' from flooding, adds Mariani.
Lamia Kamal-Chaoui of the OECD says maintaining municipalities in areas like Garfagnana 'protects the cities below' from flooding". Photograph: Hatim Kaghat via AFP
It carries a wider cost to society, generating 'a geography of discontent, which in turn creates political discontent, social discontent, putting our democracy in danger', says Kamal-Chaoui.
Attempts at reversing the trend range from selling houses for €1 to encourage new arrivals to restore them, to subsidising vital services and repurposing civic buildings so they can serve several different functions. Some areas are turning to tourism, encouraging second-home ownership even as some other areas turn against it.
The OECD urges rural areas to 'shrink smartly'. This includes consolidating services, boosting connectivity and using technology to improve access to healthcare and education. It encourages rural areas to talk up the opportunities and the quality of life in rural communities. The aim is that this will help shift the narrative away from the challenges.
But the underlying issues in remote rural areas – ageing populations, falling birth rates and a paucity of employment opportunities – will be harder to address. Molezuelas mayor, Alexandre Satue Lobo, says he is trying to maintain local services as best he can, but regards reversing population decline as an impossible task.
'You have to manage it,' he says. 'But I don't see how the village can go back to being what it once was.'
Drift
As with many other rural areas, the gradual decline of Molezuelas began with a drift of residents towards industrialising urban areas, such as the Spanish port city of Bilbao or even France.
The rise of the knowledge economy since the 1960s has made urban centres more important, while many of the traditional industries that were the backbone of rural communities have declined.
In eastern Europe, decades of centralised industrialisation under Soviet influence helped push rural populations towards urban centres. As a result, protracted emigration and low birth rates are contributing to double-digit rural population losses in Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania.
Families are having fewer children across most of the developed world. There were only 3.6 million births in the EU in 2024, according to Eurostat, the lowest on record and well below the years up to the mid-1970s, when births routinely topped 6 million annually.
'Our actual biggest concern, at the moment, is a lack of children,' says Markus Hirvonen, mayor of North Karelia in Finland's easternmost region. Many of its 13 municipalities have shrunk to a third or less of the population they had in the 1960s. In the cluster of villages that make up Juuka, only nine babies were born last year while 150 people died, Hirvonen says. 'Nowadays there are a lot of very empty villages,' he adds.
As a result of these trends, the EU's rural population is forecast to shrink by 18 per cent by 2100, with some areas – including in Bulgaria, Croatia, Portugal and Lithuania – expected to lose one-third of their rural inhabitants or more.
In parts of rural Finland near the Russian border, declining population density is viewed as a strategic risk. 'We absolutely don't want these areas to die,' says Hirvonen, adding that its geographical location means it is 'very important' to maintain 'living villages and small municipalities, and people who are committed to this area'.
For young people in rural areas, one of the draws of urban centres is universities. This will be the case for the 17-year-old daughter of Danilo Musetti, who runs a holiday home and rental bike centre in Garfagnana. Depopulation 'will be much more dramatic with the new generations as they look for job opportunities elsewhere', he predicts.
In Molezuelas, which has emptied out faster than anywhere else in Zamora, the signs of decline are everywhere. The local school closed in 1969. The village football pitch is a jungle of shoulder-high grass.
As its population declined, services fell away. The health centre, which only opens one day a week, on a Wednesday, is now at risk of closure. The commune's sole business today is a bar and the nearest big supermarket is 40km away.
Elderly residents rely on travelling vendors to bring them bread, milk, fruit and vegetables, but they are getting old too. 'We were very well served until recently, but then they started retiring,' says María del Pilar Martínez as she buys a baguette from baker Margarita Casado's van. 'It will be this señora's turn soon.'
Mayor Satue Lobo, the son of a Spanish emigrant father and a French mother, says he is left clutching at straws. Tax revenues are dwindling, and he is even struggling to get a communal recycling container from the provincial government.
'I spend a lot of time reading documents about the subsidies we might be able to access,' he says.
Tax breaks
Most European countries have initiatives in place to revive or stem the decline of rural areas.
Spain's €13 billion demographic plan contains 130 measures, including regional tax breaks and housing incentives for the countryside. Italy has a long-running strategy for 'inner areas', the UK has its 'shared prosperity fund' and there are so-called settlement officers in the Scottish Highlands in charge of helping people to move or stay in the area.
In Garfagnana, the lush mountainous region between Pisa and Florence, mayor Mariani uses her own wages to fund extra music and science and maths lessons in local schools, along with childcare before and after the school day, in a bid to attract families. The area also offers abandoned houses for €1 and subsidies to people moving from elsewhere. Derelict buildings have been restored to create affordable housing for the community.
In partnership with the Tuscan regional government, local bars in remote hamlets have been repurposed as public service hubs, allowing residents to pay bills, access healthcare appointments and connect to the digital state. To save money, services such as business permits, public procurement and emergency alerts are now provided jointly across over a dozen municipalities in the area.
'The challenge is to improve services, so not so many families desire to leave,' says Mariani. She also wants to see more investment from the national government in transport and connectivity as well as reduced tax rates.
Yet Garfagnana, classified as an intermediate region by Eurostat because it lies on the fringe of an industrial and urban province, has still lost 10.5 per cent of its population in the past decade. Many of its municipalities have seen their populations halve since the 1960s. A few hamlets are now completely abandoned.
Most of the local authorities in the areas have lost any banking presence, with an over 20 per cent fall in clothing shops, bars and bakeries over the past decade across the valley. House prices are a quarter of those in the wider province, with a 13 per cent decline just in the past year.
At the EU level, there is a €392 billion cohesion fund in the current budget for regional policy, but it is facing pressure to maintain or increase that number in the next budget starting from 2028.
Last year, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta called on the EU to enforce the principle of the 'freedom to stay', to help many areas across Europe stop losing population and basic services, in a high-level report on the future of the single market.
Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta has called on the EU to enforce the principle of the 'freedom to stay'. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/ AFP
The issue was also raised in June by Denis Nesci, member of the European Parliament and rapporteur of a call to action, who wants the EU to implement targeted measures to 'reverse this trend' of young people fleeing their home towns.
'The ongoing exodus ... is progressively weakening these regions,' he said. This deprives them 'of the conditions needed for young people to remain in their places of origin'.
But breaking the cycle of fewer people and more costly and downsized public services is increasingly challenging.
In the Scottish Highlands, the demographic crisis being driven by 'the lack of sustainable employment, the lack of services provision, and the lack of affordable and available housing', according to Raymond Bremner, leader of Highland Council. The population of parts of the vast, mountainous region is projected to fall at double-digit rates by 2040.
The council fights to provide 'access to those services as close to their community as possible,' says Bremner, including buying a bus company to provide affordable services to remote areas and mothballing schools rather than closing them completely.
But, he adds, 'you've got to balance that with providing children a socially supported educational experience where they have the ability to play with their peers'.
Depopulation
In North Karelia, the campaign to arrest depopulation has begun in earnest. Remote learning is used in schools to cover specialist subjects. There are funds to attract businesses and investment to rural areas. A mobile healthcare system provides travelling nurses, dentists and doctors to an ageing population.
Sports centres are free of charge to attract people from the cities where those services are expensive and baby bonuses are offered to young families. Empty schools have been sold to private owners, while others – often with only a few children on their roll – are kept running with some pupils brought in by taxi.
'I try to figure out every day what I can do more ... but it's very, very difficult,' says mayor Hirvonen, who expects depopulation to continue despite the efforts.
Molezuelas has bet on its appeal as a holiday destination. A string of well-tended second homes has appeared, mostly owned by people from Bilbao or France who are related to those who left the village in the past.
This points to the future mayor Bertín sees: a place with little-to-no permanent residents or amenities, but an annual infusion of life in the form of summer holidaymakers.
There is increasing momentum to recast the narrative around rural areas to reverse their fortunes. Zamora's provincial government has launched the initiative
Mi Pueblo Acoge
, or 'My Village Welcomes', which aims to attract mostly Latin American immigrants to fill jobs in rural areas.
Alongside the non-profit Talento 58 foundation, which is linked to the church, the initiative has helped resettle 124 families since 2022, including some Venezuelans who are qualified engineers, doctors and administrators.
'People call it 'emptied Spain'. I call it the Spain of opportunities,' says Jesús Alemán, the foundation's director, noting some newcomers have taken over local family businesses.
A similar message is coming from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Christina Morrison, who works for a settlement office in Uist – a group of six islands that make up the Outer Hebridean Archipelago – is in favour of promoting a more positive vision 'so people could be actually interested in living in these places', she says.
Her role is to help people relocate to the Outer Hebrides, or stay in the area where schools are shrinking and closing. While she is frank about the challenges – a lack of affordable housing, childcare and reliable transport – she says there is a longer list of reasons to live on the islands.
Children walk around safely with a 'freedom that you wouldn't give to a child in the mainland' and then there is the joy of socialising in a supportive, tight-knit community.
People might be busy with jobs, farming, gardening, volunteering or caring for more vulnerable people 'but there is no stress', adds Morrison.
That is on top of the breathtaking natural beauty that the Outer Hebrides is known for. 'There's nowhere else in the world to be when the sun is shining.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025