In an area of Spain famed—or rather, infamous—for its demographic decline, the small town of Sariegos seems to be beating the odds of the España Vaciada, or Emptied Spain.
The weight of Spain’s population shifted from rural to urban areas in the 1960s and villages, and even many small towns have, with few exceptions, steeply declined since.
Bringing in the young
In the case of Sariegos, though, the Spanish newspaper El Debate reports, “The key to the success of this small municipality is linked to the City Council’s plan to attract young families in northern Spain.”
The small town has had a population boom in the last twenty years. Additionally, last year, the city council started offering direct financial incentives to move in, distributing 12,000 euros to 26 households that had newly registered as residents of Sariegos and pledged to live there for at least two years. For the near future, it has plans to build more than 280 homes, as well as additional public housing, and to make improvements to public facilities and transport routes. New school buildings are already under construction, though so far, there are only primary schools and daycare centers in town.
Sariegos is hardly the first municipality of rural Spain to put government programs in place to attract new residents, particularly young families. Stories regularly emerge in Spanish media of villages that have advertised for someone with children to run the local bar, offering housing along with the gig. Applicants for such a situation are never lacking. Other villages and towns have converted old military barracks or other empty public buildings into affordable apartments and have attracted new residents, including families with children. The schemes savvy city councils come up with, if well advertised, usually produce their desired results.
Country living or bedroom communities?
But Sariego’s “baby checks” only follow a demographic and housing boom it did not necessarily ask for.
Sariegos lies just twenty minutes by car from the center of León, a historic city and the capital of the province of the same name. Founded by the Romans, today the city is a university town of 121,281 residents. It grew steadily from the 1970s until its population peaked in 1996 at 145,240 residents before beginning to decline. Meanwhile, the populations of small towns nearby started to boom. In 1970, Sariegos, approximately 8 kilometers from León, had a population of merely 1,584 residents. By 2001, the population had doubled to 3,000 and later peaked at over 4,000 people. It gained 200 residents in 2021, according to El Debate, as part of the exodus from flats in cities to homes with gardens following the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. The town, which includes in its population data three surrounding villages governed by the Sariegos town hall, now holds 5,500 hundred inhabitants.
A drive out to Sariegos from León reveals the source of the decades-long population growth—an ex-urban housing boom. As El Debate reports, much of the population growth of Sariegos is concentrated in Carbajal de La Legua, where clusters of modern residential housing—neighborhoods of individual homes with gardens, alongside developments of row houses and flats—have eclipsed and transformed much of the former rurality of the area, though Sariegos itself and other villages attached to it also have significant amounts of new housing stock.
There’s a golf course, too, nearby. These developments emerged in the 1990s, coinciding with a general construction boom in Spain that lasted until the financial crisis of 2008 and is mirrored in many urban centers throughout the country. As cities grew, the rural areas beyond the city provided affordable space for larger homes with modern commodities. The ubiquity of the car, of course, made the creation of such ‘bedroom communities’ possible. Today, Sariegos is still a bedroom community of León, even if its growing population means the area has its own municipal recreation facilities and primary schools. Most adults work beyond the municipal limits and children must attend the obligatory secondary school education in León.
Villages at other points on the periphery of León have undergone similar transformations, most notably Villaquilambre and San Andres del Rabanedo, which both more than doubled their populations from the 1980s through the 2010s. Closer to León than Sariegos, today they are perfectly blended with the provincial capital, their populations stuffed mostly into flats and row houses.
As cities expand, remote rural areas shrink
But further afield from León, in another historic city, the situation is quite different. Astorga, with a population in 2023 of 10,321, was also built by the Romans about the same time as León Though only 43 kilometers from León—a relatively short distance by today’s transportation standards—it has a long history of cultural and economic independence from the capital city. It is, for example, the site of a massive Gothic Cathedral and one of only three works of the architect Antoni Gaudí outside of Catalonia, the Episcopal Palace, today a museum. Economically, an industry of pastry and chocolate production developed in the 19th century and continues today. Unfortunately, though, much of the large and small industry, as well as farming, that gave the city and the area around it a diverse and robust economy has been lost to globalization, the concentration of business and production in the increasingly few entities, and the rise of the Internet. Today, the main industry in the town is tourism.
While Sariegos has grown, Astorga has shrunk, its population also peaking in the 1990s and falling ever since. In fact, it was long the third largest city in the province, but is now far surpassed in population by Villaquilambre and San Andres del Rabanedo, lowering its ranking to fifth. One nearby village, the Val de San Lorenzo, which once had a robust and profitable textile industry that supplied wool blankets to the Spanish army, is also using similar tactics as those of Sarigeos to reinforce its population, offering public housing.
Hippie love
But the most impressive example of natural repopulation in the province is the village of Mataveneros. Completely abandoned in the 1960s, the hamlet perched on the side of a mountain about a thirty-minute drive from Astorga was repopulated by an international group of hippies in the 1980s. There are no incentives to raise a family there—a village inaccessible by car (the last stretch to the village can only be made on foot) and completely off the grid—except for the desire to completely escape urbanity, even the quieter version of the ‘bedroom community.’ But that seems to be incentive enough for some. For the past forty years, the village has had the highest birth rate of any village in León.
