Village's first baby born in 43 years becomes local celebrity
Tuesday, February 18, 2020 @ 1:53 PM
A BABY born in a Segovia-province village has caused euphoria among locals – his is the first birth in Puebla de Pedraza since 1977.
Yerai is only just over two weeks old, but when he grows up, he will almost certainly learn how he has made history – and probably saved his village from extinction.
Puebla de Pedraza, in the sparsely-populated centre-northern region of Castilla y León, has just 46 inhabitants, and the average age of the population is 70.
No children have been born there in 43 years.
Rural Spain is gradually becoming empty, since working-age inhabitants move closer to larger towns or cities to get jobs, and if they decide to have children, they need to be near enough to schools and health centres and communities of other kids for their youngsters to have somebody to play with.
This means the majority of residents in small, remote villages are retired, and it is feared that within a generation or two, could become completely empty.
For this reason, Spain's government is seeking ways to create employment in the countryside and looking into setting up grant schemes to fund local services such as internet and phone lines – often absent in villages with a population count in two figures, given that telecommunications companies would not get a return on their investment if they set up infrastructure in these.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com