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Magnifique !

I live in one of the empty Spain provinces: once you drive 20 km north or northeast from the main city, Guadalajara, there is just some 10,000 people in an area very much the size of Sicily. While it is sad to see so many towns where only some 20-100 people live, I completely understand why it happened: from 1960 onwards, the younger generation wanted the comfort and the educational, work, and entertainment choices of the cities. Most people in the city of Guadalajara have a "pueblo", i.e. the town of their ancestors, and very many still keep and care for the home back in the town, but only go there some weekends and maybe some time in the summer. The rest of the year, the houses are empty.

These villages can also be marketed to shoot movies and tv series it could generate money and bring back people with skills to the area. When people will shift from working at the office to working at home these villages might also become more viable.

Your intelligent and sympathetic interpretation to the reality of these dying communities is wonderful.

Jesus! Although I congratulate you on attempting to pronounce the Spanish names, there's no need to overdo it. It almost sounds worse than no attempt. On another note, your video is highly exaggerated. I travel around Spain at least 12 times a year, to every corner of it, particularly to Extremadura and Castille-La Mancha. For example, the road that you travelled between Valencia and Aragon is a mountain back road anyway. It always has been. The main road is a motorway. I live very near this road and I rarely use it. And, although rural Spain is declining, it's nowhere near as bad as you suggest. Nevertheless, the depopulation has been fantastic for Spanish flora and fauna. Thanks to it, we have wolves, vultures, bears, lynx, etc., all coming back from the brink of extinction.

Doers would be my translation. There are dreamers and doers. Doers actually make the dreams happen.

What a great video! Thank you

What about if reson to empty villages is just too many goats have been thrown down from the church towers and too many cats have lost their tails....?

Those in the tourism related businesses welcome the business the tourists bring, but those residents that do not benefit monetarily are inconvenienced by the increase in traffic, the added noise and the noisey inconsiderate behavior of the tourists.

Is called evolution, I witnessed it with my best friend, had property off grid and wanted to build more for his kids now adults. They did not want to work it, they wanted no part of the country living only to visit. He ended up selling it.

WoW, so interesting. This city is definitely on my list. Thanks for sharing. Full watch.

great video!

Brexit voters are on the same intellectual level as Trump supporters. What do you expect.

My parents' village ( in Soria, in central Spain) currently has 40-50 residents. All of them are over 60 years old. Its days as a living village are numbered. Its story is the same as that of thousands of villages in forgotten Spain. In the 1970s, its inhabitants ( like my parents ) emigrated to the industrial cities of Barcelona, ​​Madrid, and Zaragoza. The countryside, agriculture, and livestock farming were dying. The dictator Franco starved the villages and their people. Then came democracy, Spain's entry into the European Union, and no investment was made in modernizing the countryside. They continued to be mistreated. Too many demands and sacrifices. The young people who survived have had to continue fleeing, searching for opportunities. Today, my parents' village is witnessing its end. Thousands of years of history, epic tales, and culture will be buried under weeds and silence. A tragedy !!!

All my friends, would rather live in a huge apartment or house in this country.

So they do not want tourists? I will be coming via a Cruise ship in a few weeks. So maybe not even bother getting off the ship in Barcelona? I am not coming there to live. Just hang out a day and then go back to the USA. Your problems are with the ones that are trying to move in and change things. I will probably bypass it and spend my money in Italy.

Appreciated brother! Have a great one

Here Spain. If you go to other country (That is for English tourism in general) we say in spanish “wherever you go, do whatever you see “. That means that english tourism is not the best tourism. Don’t think that you are the Kings an Queens of the place you go on holidays. I’ve even seen a bar where you must speak only in English!!!! YOU must speak in spanish. There are English people that lives here in Spain for years AND THEY CAN’T SAY A WORD IN SPANISH. That’s a shame, I don’t know how all that’s not forbbiden. And lastly, I’ve never been traited so badly on holidays as in England. How curious.

Quiero mudarme a Murcia a trabajar! Espero que logres tus metas, saludos desde Portugal! 😊

Tradução errada!!! Não é Muria e sim Murcia.

In Spain the State only take care of you if you have indepence movements in your region, they block all the possible investment, and move factories and bussines to always the three or four same regions, the CAP's laws obstruct the agrarial sector (which is the only sector they allow us to have) and then give us some peanuts while we are struggling because of them.

My skills farming...20 Acer farm alov Spain government ..I come to spin..

2.4.2026 // Poor old black cat with sad eyes ; must be feeling lost without noisy kids aound. Too much work to be done for I-PHONE generation ... OUT OF DATE ..Life has become more of a burden for most ppl. ; cost of living is high for average wage earners renting a home. Being ill & jobless is a death sentence []

Wow, gerade Deinen Kanal entdeckt❤ das ist ja schön, würde gerne mitfahren, aber so ist auch sehr schön😊🪻🕊🍀🙏🏿🙏🏿👍👍👍👍beste Grüße

Reminds me of a village i visited in croatia last summer, which was abondonned because of the jugoslav war with its last residsnt leaving around 20 years ago. A lot of stuff remained there and the nature is claiming back the land.....

its cuz leon cleared out the villages. las plagas!

Well done video ……A lot of this terrain shown looks like California .it’s hard to believe at one time this was the most powerful country in the world

AI narrator sucks

Imagine a world where remote work was embraced. People could work and live and revive these little towns.

I would love to visit this magnificent place

You can take any direction from Madrid and in less of 50 km everything is empty, but Madrid itself has 7.5 million population, it's like an oasis in the middle of nowhere

GRACIAS.❤

Cagó dios, en Cáceres y Badajoz

I see in the comments people from around Europe have the same experiences. Depopulated rural areas. From Sweden, to Greece, to Bulgaria, to Italy. I know living close to Sweden, that is the case in Sweden. Oftentimes when you travel from Norway to Sweden, everything becomes empty once you enter Sweden. The people have all moved away. Norway is one of the exception to this European trend. While the rural areas have lost population to the cities, I don't know of many abandoned villages. Those are always particular cases, like the island of Grip far out in the ocean which were forcefully depopulated due to lack of water. If I go up the hill from where I live I can look over to an island where only two houses still have people living in them, but, there's only five houses on that entire island and the other three houses are used and kept as vacation homes. Myself I live very rural, the closest town is an hour away, the closest city is 8 hours. The island only has 500 inhabitant. The only store is a small local store with expensive prices(compared to mainland), and in a 500 m radius of me there's just 10-15 houses. But there's still 5g boxes out on the road, and fiber in every house. There's still a bus that comes five times a day. There's a restaurant on the other side of the island, a hardware store, a hairdresser, a school, a kindergarten, a doctor's office. You will of course save money if you once a week go into town and shop there. If people did that, the store would close. You will save money if you get your hair cut in town, if you buy your hardware there, and so on. They made a bridge and tunnel connection to the mainland, so you can just drive to get conveniences now. But then you'd see a dead island. I've actually heard people shopping on the mainland get called "Judas shoppers". If you Europeans wants to know how to keep rural villages alive, it's not idealism or fancy day dreams. Local communities keep themselves alive with dugnad(unpaid work), petty neighbours and stubborn local identity. And a whole lot of money invested in infrastructure. The bridges and tunnels linking these six islands to the mainland for example cost over 500 million Euros, and only serves 2500 people. It's nearly 200 000 euros per inhabitant just for the road connection alone. But a large part of the price was paid by starting to collect money from people 50 years before the construction started, and the rest by the grace of the region and state government who for some unknown reason prioritise small rural backwaters. It's not pretty, it's not cheap, it doesn't happen magically. But it can happen.

It's fitting the guy explains hacendera wearing a Norwegian flag, as hacendera(called dugnad in Norwegian) central to the Norwegian identity. I've lived several places in Norway, from the most rural to the biggest city, and everywhere there has been dugnad which the locals gather together to do.

It looks like one of the locations for Walking Dead - Daryl Dixon.

It's always a bit surprising that these places draw so little attention. I bet lots of people would consider a patch of dirt in such lovely country to be living the dream.

These depopulated places are where Catholic Spaniards survived the Arab attacks from the south. They must be cherished and protected.

"Hacenderas” (rural/antiguo): Se refiere a trabajos comunitarios que hacen los vecinos juntos, especialmente en pueblos (como limpiar caminos, reparar algo, etc.)

dont stick your nose into other,s bussiness or bust

Excellent presentation.

Worked in Murcia in the early 2000s I knew Cartagena was magical this video proved it!

I wish there was a movement from the European parliament and the local governments to incentivise young people to move to these places and fix them up. I wouldn't know how to begin organizing something like that. But suppose you were able to work remotely, or just have more work available in the region. Imagine how positive that would be for population density. Wouldn't it be peaceful to raise a family in such a part of Europe? We don't need to hoard together in a couple of mega cities. We should try and make our continent lively again.

Un tío con visera y chanclas vendiéndote España como si fuera una tarta para inmigrantes turistas, ¡anda ya!

Why that backrground music? So ludicrous...!

We must make living in villages cool again. The european governments have literally abandoned farmers to the point they can’t sustain families so obviously this is the sad result.

Socialism never ends well.

Great video!

Big Resident Evil 4 vibes. I always wondered how the Spanish village in that game felt so isolated from modern society. This video does a great job of giving historical context to a fictional game lol.

In small populations, who do the youngest generation marry that they are in no way related to?