The PP is threatened with losses in the elections in Galicia

DThe wind shakes the lonely stop. There is no bus in sight, not even a timetable. There are just a few posters for the regional elections in Galicia on Sunday stuck to the corrugated iron walls. “The Galicia that works,” promises the ruling conservative PP, “The Galicia that you want,” the nationalist BNG promises.

The further the narrow road from Nogueira to Castro Caldelas winds its way into the Galician province, the less election advertising becomes. No one is to be seen, in the hamlets along the way there is only a suspicious dog.

The first camellias are already budding. Lush green from abundant rain is the demographic desert that begins a few kilometers outside the provincial capital Ourense. “Only old people and a few farmers live up here,” says a gas station attendant with a shrug. Natural beauty and decline lie side by side. Anyone who turns off the main road to take a look into the deep Sil Valley will come across one of the many “ghost villages”.

Galicia has been bleeding dry for decades

Galicia has almost 1,800 “aldeas fantasmas” and occupies one of the sad top places in Spain among the places without residents. The tiled roofs have collapsed, the windows resemble empty eye sockets, and ivy and grass are overgrowing the remains of the walls. The crisis area is in the Ribeira Sacra, one of the most beautiful wine regions in Spain.

In Castro Caldelas, residents are proud that they recently made it onto the list of “The Most Beautiful Villages in Spain”. The narrow cobbled streets lead past pretty houses to the castle of the Counts of Lemos. But the large community also represents a sad record in the province of Ourense. There are 16 completely abandoned places in its area. Only one person lives in 108 villages in the province, and almost 500 have fewer than five inhabitants. They are called “resistance villages” because there is still hope that they will survive.

The interior of Galicia has been bleeding dry for decades. Ourense is the Spanish province that has lost the most inhabitants in the past 50 years, more than a third of its population. Almost 200,000 people emigrated or moved to big cities. The acute bleeding is no longer quite as severe. That was due to the pandemic, not politics. Out of fear of the virus, more people remembered their roots and moved from the cities to their lonely places of origin. In Castro Caldelas, four abandoned villages were revived. But the younger ones are missing. In the neighboring community, the average age is over 63 years. In many places a quarter of the residents are older than 75 years.

“We are becoming fewer and older, if we continue at this rate we will disappear completely,” says Jesús Vázquez. The 79-year-old is one of the founders of the platform “Galicia Baleira” (in German: “empty Galicia”). More than sixty percent of Spain is similarly empty. In Madrid, a separate “Ministry for the Demographic Challenge” is intended to help ensure that the two Spains do not drift further apart.

In the extreme north-west of Spain, the interior is dying out, while the capital Santiago de Compostela and especially the “Atlantic axis” are thriving: it stretches from the port city of Vigo via A Coruña, near which Zara's parent company is based, to Ferrol with its shipyards. Many Galicians have moved from the villages to the coast, where more than two million of the 2.7 million citizens live. Two million Galicians emigrated in the last century. First to South America, later to the industrial centers of Spain and as guest workers to Germany.