Spain’s Economy Sends City Residents Back to Country

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Spain’s Economy Sends City Residents Back to Country

By RAPHAEL MINDER

VILLANUEVA DE LA VERA, Spain — A chemist by training, Silvia Barcenilla searched for a job in Madrid for almost a year. But in March, she decided to try a different approach, moving here to the village of Villanueva de la Vera, a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the west.

Within two months, she was working for a resort, the Hospedería del Silencio, which runs yoga courses and other recreation activities on onetime farmland. She signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment for 200 euros, or about $255, a month, just a fraction of what it would cost her in Madrid. “If I had found a great job in Madrid, I would not even have thought about moving here,” she said. “But now I don’t see any obvious reason to go back.”

Ms. Barcenilla is part of a movement within Spain that has swelled to such proportions that some sociologists have dubbed it “rurbanismo,” a term invented to describe the reverse migration from city to country that has stemmed a generations-old trend that has long been the usual pattern in most advanced industrial economies.

The movement has steadily built, but it has been accelerated by Spain’s economic crisis, breathing new life and entrepreneurship into some nearly abandoned areas. “Rurbanismo started before the crisis, once the Internet took off and made it possible to work anywhere, but what the crisis is doing is making the model more attractive,” said Carles Feixa, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Lleida.

The movement is difficult to quantify, he said, partly since many of the new migrants do not bother changing their official residence. But it is clear, he said, that Spain’s cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants have recently stopped growing while villages of fewer than 1,000 are no longer shrinking.

Some of these new migrants are returning to the villages where they grew up or where earlier generations of their family lived, sometimes taking over property that had been left empty or used only for vacations.

Economic necessity is certainly not the only reason Spaniards are moving to the country. Around Villanueva, for instance, a community of artists has sprouted, from graphic designers to musicians and sculptors. Some have restored farm buildings in which tobacco and peppers used to dry.

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