The last inhabitants of the villages

Demothanasia is the process by which political actions or omissions lead to the disappearance of a territory's population. Death by depopulation is slow and silent. It is merciless with the territory, nature and heritage. The situation is no less dramatic for the people who live or, rather, resist in rural areas. Those who live in the most absolute solitude in a silent, silenced and misnamed empty Spain. In reality, it is not yet empty. Europe is the most ageing continent in the world. One of the regions most affected by ageing according to Eurostat is Galicia. There is a high percentage of elderly people with a lack of residential autonomy or with a certain degree of dependency who are reluctant to leave the land where they have lived all their lives. They live alone where care and assistance are conspicuous by their absence. Extremely worrying social contexts in the face of insufficient resources on the part of the administration and the passivity, full of implicit violence, of the political actors involved. A large part of the ageing population is abandoned in these areas with a lack of care and very limited social and health care coverage. These are traditionally smallholding territories due to the sinuous orography that makes intensive production impossible. The current voracious market of macro-production and over-production, the lack of quality telecommunications and connections means that the demographic pyramid in most of the territories is inverted. There are population centres where the pyramid does not even have a base due to the low birth rate and the massive rural exodus. The depopulation of rural areas is one of the causes of numerous environmental problems such as the increase in the voracity of forest fires or the increase in soil erosion. If there are no radical changes in this respect: the death of the last rural inhabitants will bring with it the death of a social model and then it will be an empty Spain.