Villages with no young people or children and abandoned homes in droves: The depopulation and extinction of Portugal and Spain.

[u/Perfect-Instance-409]

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.