Rural allure: Six villages that have paid people to move in
Thursday, November 17, 2022 @ 5:23 PM
For most people residing anywhere else in the world, merely living in Spain itself is payment enough. But in recent years, a number of municipalities have been offering everything from cut-priced rent or building plots on sale for three-figure sums through to guaranteed jobs - and even non-means-tested cash grants to people moving in, as well as lump sums for children born there.
The O Porto area of Rubiá in the Galicia province of Ourense - one of the municipalities that has offered financial incentives to attract new residents (photo: Candil_celta/Wikimedia Commons)
You won't find schemes like this in major beach holiday hotspots, on the Costas, or in big cities, though. The idea of financial incentives for people to move to the municipalities in question is to prevent their population from declining, and to justify keeping or acquiring facilities that may otherwise be considered non-cost effective.
A typical street in Olmeda de la Cuesta (Cuenca province), another village seeking to encourage newcomers (photo: Vitalij Fleganov/Wikimedia Commons)
Around 53% of Spain's municipalities are considered to be in danger of rural exodus or 'depopulation', being very small and remote, largely occupied only by retirees and with no children being born in them, frequently because they are too far to commute from. Many of these 'shrinking villages' are trying to sell themselves as peaceful and pleasant bases for remote workers, who do not need to worry about living conveniently close to the office, but even this is not easy: Where a population 20 kilometres or more from the nearest decent-sized town has barely 100 or 200 residents, many of them retired, mobile phone and internet operators are reluctant to set up networks in them, as the cost of installation would never be recovered – demand is not high enough – and without internet, you cannot feasibly
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