Buy PRIVATE 55 [A]lone for the same reason as always: depopulation. Spain has been reinforcing a geographic pattern that shows obvious contrast between the emptier central areas of the peninsula and the outlying ones. Between 1960 and 2005 the Spanish rural population fell from 34,5% to 15,3%.
This phenomenon of falling population happens mainly in three areas: Spanish North West (Galicia and Asturias) due to spread population, in provinces of Castile-Leon with small villages affected by depopulation, and mountain areas which have difficult access, like the Pyrenees. All of them are areas of North Spain. In the South of the peninsula the agro-city model was historically imposed: a town where the rural and the urban come together. When Spain experienced the communication revolution in the 80’s, it left aside the rural population (villages with less than 2,000 inhabitants). The highways and expressways set the urban areas, the towns, the places where people passed by. Since then, the rural world is socially conceived as an endangered way of living. It’s been calculated that in year 2050 just 14% of developed countries population will live in rural areas. Facing this blurred reality, we decided to go all over the country to identify those who risk being the last residents. This is a journey to those villages which, with only one home, challenge their own existence.
(Juan Millás & Eduardo Nave | The Last Residents, PRIVATE 55, pages 76-81)
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