How the Basque Country avoided the ‘Empty Spain’ problem
As Spanish city dwellers struggle with affordability and politicians call for people to move to ‘Empty Spain’ as a solution, we look at how the Basque Country managed to avoid the problem of poor population distribution decades ago.
There isn’t really a word for town in Spanish.
There’s ciudad (city) and pueblo (village) but if you want to call a place a town you’ve either got to call it una ciudad pequeña (small city) or un pueblo grande (large village).
That’s not to say towns don’t exist in Spain. Ronda in Andalusia, Cudillero in Asturias, Cadaqués in Catalonia, Deià in Mallorca, La Orotava in Tenerife are all fairly famous examples of picturesque and popular Spanish towns.
But for the most part Spanish towns are losing population, following the same trend of Spanish villages, most of which fall into what’s called ‘Empty Spain’.
In the midst of Spain’s housing crisis and the wave of protests, strikes and snap elections that have evolved as a result, the centre-right PP opposition party has been promoting policies that aim to encourage Spaniards to leave the city for the countryside.
The standout proposal is to completely scrap property tax and stamp duty for first-time buyers under 40 who buy a home in a pueblo.
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While it may be true that housing is far cheaper in rural Spain and there are millions of empty houses to be bought on the cheap (albeit with hefty renovation costs), you’ll struggle to find many young Spaniards willing to move somewhere without jobs and services, even if they can work remotely and get onto a 5G network.
We’ve written before about how Spain’s population density is a European anomaly, with 90 percent of residents living in just 2.6 percent of the country.
READ MORE: Why is Spain’s population so poorly distributed?
So for Empty Spain to get back on its feet and become appealing to Spaniards, authorities would really need to build from the ground up.
And they need look no further than the Basque Country to see how it’s been done before.
In 1990, the Basque government introduced the Territorial Balance Act.
The concept was simple. Instead of concentrating wealth and population into a single megacity – in this case Bilbao – the Basque Country decided to set up key industries evenly across its valleys, smaller towns and secondary cities.
Vitoria-Gasteiz and San Sebastián – as well as a dense network of municipalities across the industrial valleys of the Goierri and Debabarrena regions – began to act as economic anchors for the mighty Bilbao.
Nowadays, this decentralised approach is really embedded across Euskadi. Each town or area has its own manufacturing niche, and technical colleges quickly put local youth on a pathway toward high-paying careers in their hometowns.
So why did the Basques do this?
By the 1980s, the region’s traditional heavy industries – shipbuilding, steel, and mining – had collapsed, and the Basque Country was busy reinventing itself into a modern service and high-tech manufacturing hub.
Nonetheless, local politicians realised that all this success in a single hyper-developed city would create overpopulation, traffic congestion and exorbitant housing costs in Bilbao, and leave the rest of Euskadi forgotten. Sound familiar?
The Mondragón Cooperative also has a lot to do with this approach of distributing wealth and population evenly.
Founded in a small Basque town which it takes its name from, it is the world’s largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives.
Because the cooperatives are anchored in their communities by design, they prioritise job preservation and local reinvestment over moving operations to cheaper locations or urban areas, again preventing the typical rural flight seen in other parts of Spain and across the world.
The Basques are known for doing things differently, and it no doubt helps that the region collects its own taxes, enjoying more financial self-governance than other Spanish regions.
However, they were also clearly ahead of their time when realising the risks of putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of economic and territorial planning.
That’s not to say that housing costs and rents have not gone up across El País Vasco (that’s proven impossible everywhere in the country) but they have provided an example of how to achieve better population distribution, wealth and social cohesion across Spain, starting with their towns.
