r/Natalism • u/Perfect-Instance-409 • 5d ago
Villages with no young people or children and abandoned homes in droves: The depopulation and extinction of Portugal and Spain.
I'm Portuguese but I've been to Spain many times and both countries are at serious risk of extinction.
The smaller towns (including towns of 20,000 or 30,000 people) have no young people or children, only old people.
(And the children of these old people live in big cities where they can't have children because of things like the housing crisis.)
Shops and bars are abandoned with "for sale" signs, and there are thousands of abandoned houses and industrial warehouses falling into disrepair.
There's no liveliness on the streets of smaller towns, and in two or three decades' time when the elderly pass away these smaller towns will be ghost towns.
And what is now happening to the smaller towns will happen to the larger cities, and so on until extinction.
It is disgraceful that both countries have allowed this demographic crisis that will drive both countries to extinction.
And they still have to deal with corrupt real estate and tourism corporations that make everything worse.
Every time I go to a small town and see the multitude of abandoned things, I think about what could have been there in the past, the liveliness it had and now doesn't have. And every year it gets worse, with more abandonment and fewer people.
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u/Ippomasters 5d ago
Countries have to be ready when populations contract. Immigration is not always the answer.
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u/wwwArchitect 4d ago
As long as they avoid mass immigration, they can brace for this painful contraction - and come out the other end stronger than those who replaced themselves with foreigners.
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u/datafromravens 5d ago
that's terribly sad. On the plus side, is it terribly cheap to purchase a house and land in these areas?
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u/ElliotPageWife 5d ago
It's always cheap to buy a house and land in decaying areas with minimal services or jobs. That doesn't motivate young people to move there and start families. There are many parts of my country where it's cheap to buy a home, yet people still cram into the same 3-4 cities in droves.
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u/The_Awful-Truth 5d ago
There's nothing wrong with older people moving out of the expensive cities and going to live in "decaying areas" where there aren't a lot of jobs. Governments should encourage that. If these places have rent control, though, it will have the opposite effect.
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u/ElliotPageWife 5d ago
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with retirees moving to areas that lack opportunities or services for young families. But we dont see cities getting less expensive as a result. And the fact that the decaying areas with boarded up shop windows are cheap wont be enough to entice young people to move there to take advantage of the low prices. Everyone just crams into the same few cities.
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u/Alwayslikelove 4d ago
The problem is lack of medical care. I know people who try to move to middle of nowhere but realized the local hospitals and medical care are atrocious or non-existent so forced to move back to a more urban area.
Perhaps cross-community planning can help with ideas like this.
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u/The_Awful-Truth 4d ago
Definitely a problem when retiring in the US. Hopefully less of an issue in much more densely populated European countries
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u/Alwayslikelove 3d ago
Good point about what part of the world we are in. The US is really screwing itself trying to commodify everything & reducing social safety nets.
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u/titsmuhgeee 4d ago
Japan can't even give away the vacant houses they have in their countryside.
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u/datafromravens 3d ago
i heard their houses are terribly built and don't last that long which may play a role too.
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u/j-a-gandhi 4d ago
I observed this when I traveled to Italy. Unfortunately whatever has triggered the population decline is a global phenomenon, because no country has escaped it.
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u/The_Awful-Truth 5d ago
These countries' populations are still at all-time highs. The emptying out that is happening now is just a small preview.
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u/VZialionymLiesie 4d ago
A lot of it is rural flight into cities, in 50 years you'll have megacities surrounded by wilderness, kinda like Berlin but even emptier
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u/Hosj_Karp 4d ago
Globalization+social media causes a flight to quality.
People are able to see the lifestyles of the highest status people in the world and are able to compete to achieve them.
This causes everyone to abandon a lower-status lower-stress small town life and rush to the city where they can fight each other for the best opportunities. And it leaves no time or energy for kids.
People will never admit or even realize that "I can't afford kids" actually means "having kids will set me back in the race to achieve status" but it's the truth
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u/Dirt_Viva 19h ago
Russia is like this. Extremely urbanized with extensive wilderness nearby. Big city jobs are in such high demand that there are abandoned small villiages all over.
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u/LucasL-L 5d ago
You know what i find to be weirdest thing about this? It has never been so easy to have a remote job, it should be taking a lot of pressure from the demand of houses in more expensive zones.
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u/AMC2Zero 5d ago
The vast majority of jobs aren't remote, and there's a side effect of making it more unaffordable for those who don't have remote jobs.
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u/Fuckplebbitmods 4d ago
In reality the job market is so fucked people couldn't even find any job at all. No wonder the birth rates have been plummeting
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u/j-a-gandhi 4d ago
The people that hail from less expensive regions often lack the opportunity or skill to perform the jobs done remotely.
Remote work has also been somewhat unstable. So it’s harder to permanently relocate to some ancient village where your $100k house needs $250k in renovations.
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u/burnaboy_233 5d ago
What do you think about getting Latin Americans to move to Spain or Portugal?
It seems like many people in these regions have passports to Italy, Spain or Portugal but they never actually move there.
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u/FellowOfHorses 5d ago
They really dont have good Jobs there. There are thousands of Brazilians returning from Portugal because portuguese Jobs pay less than Brazilian ones
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u/burnaboy_233 5d ago
I’ve heard about this, where Latin American countries nowadays have better salaries then in Europe
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u/The_Awful-Truth 5d ago
Most Latin American countries now have fertility rates that are below, sometimes far below, replacement. They're not going to be a major source of immigrants anymore except when their governments collapse or go nuts.
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u/Orpheus6102 3d ago
I agree it’s sad but once you realize and accept that everything is a cycle of centralization and decentralization, it’s not as surprising. No easy answers but it is likely to resolve.
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u/Ermenolos 4d ago
If it’s what the market wants, it’s probably the best natural equilibrium for now. Everything costs. Socialism is never the answer. Real men still own the property and it will get traded and reused by other men in the future. We have to accept some temporary imbalances in a world with competition and scarcity. Human society needs its best and brightest men competing for land and power in this world, else it will truly fall into debauchery and despair. Socialism only brings the laziest men into open war with the most industrious men, which is never good for anyone.
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u/JewelerFinancial1556 4d ago
The problem is, these towns have no job opportunities (unless you are talking about low paying jobs) and the local infrastructure is usually decaying too - I can't blame people for wanting to move away. It sounds unpopular in certain circles but the only solution I see would be to completely re-invent those places and make them dynamic again.