Driving through Castilla y Le\u00f3n in the northwest of Spain can create the impression of being alone in the world. The landscape is a continuous scroll of wheat fields, dry grasslands and expanses of yellow sunflowers punctuated by the occasional village; often no more than several run-down stone houses surrounding a church. With public transportation out of reach in these areas, and the distances between towns too great to walk, the only option is to travel by car.<\/p>\n
Sparsely populated regions like these are so common that they\u2019ve earned their own nickname \u2014 \u201cEspa\u00f1a Vac\u00eda,\u201d or \u201cEmpty Spain.\u201d While the country\u2019s rural areas began thinning out in the mid-20th century, when factory jobs drew workers to cities, depopulation has accelerated in recent years, and particularly in the northwest. A lack of jobs and cultural offerings, combined with poor infrastructure and housing stock, have helped fuel the exodus. Spain\u2019s rural areas saw a 4.4% population decline between 2014 and 2023, according to a government report<\/a>, even as the country\u2019s overall population grew by 2.6%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Driving through Castilla y Le\u00f3n in the northwest of Spain can create the impression of being alone in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,8790,1294,5030,80,464,1371,4655,640,1219,1217,387,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-132329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-cities","tag-economy","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-government","tag-infrastructure","tag-jobs","tag-real-estate","tag-spain","tag-tourism","tag-transportation","tag-travel","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}