"In the 1960s, when the demographic decline of rural Spain began, there was a certain overpopulation in those areas and people emigrated due to poverty, lack of opportunities, geographical isolation due to the lack of infrastructure and services... But now the problem is not that people emigrate, but that there is no one to emigrate or have children and, therefore, from the point of view of demographic recovery the only alternative is immigration," says Joaquín Recaño Valverde, a researcher at the Center d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED) of the UAB that has just published a study on the factors that determined the rural exodus in the Spain of developmentalism and which could now function as protectors against depopulation.
And his conclusions are not very encouraging: the only realistic alternative to recover depopulated territories is immigration, but it will not work everywhere. "In a town of 20 inhabitants, what immigration is going to arrive? If it arrives, it will be anecdotal and the people who arrive there will experience the causes that caused its depopulation," says Recaño.
Convinced that rural depopulation is going to increase and that "not all towns are salvageable" through immigration, the demographer proposes focusing efforts on the regional capitals.
"As we cannot make an investment for all rural populations, we have to establish a line of defense against depopulation in those localities that can resist and that also articulate the territory, and those are the regional capitals, which many are seeing as their inhabitants decrease because the birth rate is neither there nor expected, mortality is and is increasing due to ageing, and young people are fleeing from this decline", justifies the CED researcher.
For this reason, he believes that, in the fight against depopulation, investments, public and private, must focus on those cities or large towns that articulate the population of a rural area and always after studying their future viability.
"People do not improvise: either they are born in one place and establish roots, or they come from another and they have to be rooted there; but to achieve that, it is not enough to think about local development projects, build infrastructures or put up the Internet; you have to think for that those who were there left, because the demography is very stubborn," says Recaño.
And he stresses that one of the factors to take into account when favoring the settlement of immigrants is access to housing, which is not always easy in rural areas.
"Against rural depopulation, coffee policies for all and local development projects are useless; in each area, it is necessary to first identify which municipalities are feasible to integrate this line of defense and then carry out a study of what are the economic possibilities of that area and its viability; we must take the pulse of the territory, because the solutions in Andalusia will not be the same as in Castilla y León", explains the researcher.
His study, published in the journal Perspectives Demogràfiques, makes it clear that if geographic isolation and poverty were the cause of the first depopulation of a rural world that was then full, the current depopulation takes place in an empty rural world with few expectations of demographic regeneration. Hence Recaño's conviction that policies on depopulation will only obtain results if they focus on intermediate cities and regional capitals of the provinces of the peninsular interior and not on small towns.
"The romantic idea of making people move to the towns will not save emptied Spain; the neo-rurals are not good for reestablishing populations, they rotate: they arrive, they make artisan products and, after a while, that ends; what must be defend to stop their decline are the places where there are still people, and act to make them grow", emphasizes the demographer and geographer of the CED. And he reiterates that those places where the fight against depopulation has to be fought are municipalities with at least 2,000 inhabitants and regional capitals.
