Project to revive 1,000-year-old village of Fraguas ended as activists face fines of up to €110,000
An abandoned village in Spain has been condemned to its third and final death after the rural activists who occupied it 10 years ago gave up the struggle to bring it back to life.
Fraguas’s first death came in the late 1960s, when it was expropriated by the Franco regime to make way for a huge reforestation programme; its second when it was used as an army training ground.
Continue reading...Islands bond idea, dismissed as ‘election gimmick’ by critics, found to be unpopular with islanders
Controversial proposals to offer a £50,000 welcome grant to encourage more young people and families to stay on or move to Scottish islands have been scrapped after a consultation found that islanders themselves did not believe the scheme was the right way to tackle depopulation.
The Scottish government announced that the proposed islands bond, which was dismissed as a gimmick by critics and attracted initial inquiries from as far afield as Ecuador, would not go ahead after an analysis of consultation responses found that those in favour of it were largely non-islanders.
Continue reading...Programme that involves small communities bidding for slice of €420m fund sparks controversy and division
Perched on a rock surrounded by a vast nature reserve, the hilltop hamlet of Trevinano sent tremors across the Lazio region when it was announced this month that it and its 142 residents were in line for €20m (£16.73m) from a Covid recovery fund to save small villages on the verge of extinction – equal to a whopping €140,845 per resident.
“This initiative is generating a lot of envy and bad feeling,” said Alessandra Terrosi, the mayor of Trevinano, who has the responsibility for spending the millions before 2026, when the funding programme ends. The hamlet’s good fortune has fuelled rancour among its neighbours who missed out, raised questions over how efficiently Italy will invest some of the €191bn coming its way from the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund and had critics asking if €20m is just too much money for one small village.
Continue reading...Human populations are set to decline in countries from Asia to Europe – and an unusual form of rewilding is taking place
For many years it seemed that overpopulation was the looming crisis of our age. Back in 1968, the Stanford biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich infamously predicted that millions would soon starve to death in their bestselling, doom-saying book The Population Bomb; since then, neo-Malthusian rumblings of imminent disaster have been a continual refrain in certain sections of the environmental movement – fears that were recently given voice on David Attenborough’s documentary Life on our Planet.
At the time the Ehrlichs were publishing their dark prophecies, the world was at its peak of population growth, which at that point was increasing at a rate of 2.1% a year. Since then, the global population has ballooned from 3.5 billion to 7.67 billion.
Continue reading...€180m-a-year scheme launched in response to projections of ageing and shrinking population
As the new year dawned, Maria Pardalakis was in the throes of labour. The clock had barely struck midnight when she delivered a healthy boy in a clinic on Crete.
With her son’s birth – the first in Greece this year – Pardalakis and her husband, Christos, became the first people eligible for a €2,000 (£1,700) government baby bonus. “It’s been a new year like no other, the best gift my wife could give me,” Christos enthused. “And, sure, the benefit will help – not just us, a lot of families.”
Continue reading...A small but growing number of investors are hoping to reverse the slow-motion decline of rural areas
The decade has not been kind to Manteigas. Nestled in the mountains in the Portuguese interior, this pretty town has suffered a familiar kind of slow-motion decline.
“Once the factories started closing, then the schools closed, the shops closed, even the chapel closed,” says Maria José Santos Salvado, a wizard with needle and thread who was laid off as a textile patcher when her factory shut in 2011. “All the young people left. Manteigas became a town of old people.”
Continue reading...The doctor visits once a week in Sayatón, an hour from Madrid. In the 28 April elections, vanishing towns like this could be a key issue
Just over an hour’s drive from Madrid, well beyond the industrial estates and retail parks that orbit the Spanish capital and off a main road that climbs and falls with ear-popping regularity, lies a small town that is slowly fading from the map.
Little stirs in Sayatón on a weekday morning besides the wind that whips the town hall flags and the cockerel whose crow bounces off the facades of houses, some shut up against the winter, others in varying states of decay.
Continue reading...Thousands of doctors and nurses have left Romania in past decade, leading to dire staff shortages
Gabriela Dumitru was supposed to retire years ago, but instead, she’s working longer hours than ever before. The 65-year-old is one half of a team of two doctors at the neonatology ward in Slobozia, a depressed town about two hours’ drive from Romania’s capital, Bucharest.
Dumitru works three or four 24-hour shifts a week, catching an hour of sleep where possible on a sofa in a small box room decorated with pictures of kittens. Her colleague is 75, and he officially retired 15 years ago. Between them, they do the work of four or five doctors, delivering approximately 1,200 babies a year and caring for those born with difficulties or disabilities.
Continue reading...