Palma Del Rio is a small rural town in southern Spain located halfway between the storied cities of Cordoba and Seville. Its lifeblood is the Guadalquivir River, which originates in the Sierra de Cazorla mountains and flows westward through the Andalusian countryside, before emptying into the Gulf of Cadiz at the Spanish edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The town is home to 21,000 people, many of whom make a living in some fashion from the surrounding Guadalquivir-fed orchards and fields. The land is rich with the bounty of sunflowers, durum wheat, potatoes, citrus, olives, almonds, walnuts, and more recently pecans, which bring me here annually.
The fields are colored green or gold, depending on the crop and its level of maturity, all shining under the gleaming blue Spanish sky. The fresh-turned fields reveal a chocolate brown soil, rocky in places. Their borders are brushy along the roadside and at the margins of the concrete canals, many of which date to the mid-twentieth century Franco era, carrying water to their fields or, more recently, to pumping stations, which then send it to the fields in pressurized pipes. Colorful bee eaters and white rumped swifts dive after their insect prey above the canal and over the canopy of the orchards. There is much color in Spain—the purple glow of the jacaranda trees, the pink blossoms of bougainvillea climbing the walls of whitewashed structures, red geraniums in countless clay pots, the tiles, the food. Color is everywhere, representing the joyful life here. The air, particularly in spring, is frequently redolent with the scent of orange blossoms.
I come from a rural place and rural people. A place in many ways like this. It is easy to feel at home here. The people are friendly, just as they are in my native Georgia. Southern hospitality extends well beyond borders. The countryside is beautiful in its pastoral setting, ancient, rustic, dripping with history, but the fields and orchards below the low profile of the gently rolling hills and the rural outskirts of the town are very much part of an engineered landscape. One made with an eye to beauty, but engineered nonetheless. And oddly to me, given such beauty, it is a landscape that is seemingly empty of people.
I am fortunate enough to come here each year to advise someone on the management of what is perhaps Spain’s only 300-acre pecan orchard. Palma has become a sort of home away from home to me. When I am here, I find myself lodged in a hotel that was built in the fifteenth century as a Franciscan monastery. It is my favorite hotel in the world. There are courtyards full of orange and lemon trees, whose scent fills the breezeways. There is a large garden from which fresh vegetables served in the hotel’s dining room are grown. Fifteenth-century maps drawn on cowhide decorate the walls of the hallway. It is not luxurious or ornate in a modern sense but classic, historic, and clean.
Several years ago, on my first drive out to the orchard, I noted that most of the farms we passed had old, abandoned adobe-like houses with holes in their Spanish clay tile roofs. There is one on the pecan farm I visit. It has a hole in the roof, cracks in the walls, and vines emerging from the windows of the front room. Its last whitewash has faded to a dull cream color.
Since that first visit, I have increasingly taken notice of all the old, abandoned houses whose faded beauty you can still make out as one travels through the countryside of southern Spain from Cordoba to Seville and south to Cadiz. In a way, I suppose these old “farmhouses” or “fincas” are analogous to the old sharecropper shacks that can still be seen, although increasingly less, in the rural landscape of my own region. Yet one thing struck me about the Spanish countryside. Unlike America, you don’t see many new houses being built in rural Spain, nor do you see much suburbia or sprawl. Because I have such a great interest in the relationships between people and land, I was fascinated by this phenomenon.
I have only had the opportunity to experience one small region of rural Spain, that of the Andalusian countryside in the south. It is a region whose agriculture dates back to antiquity with settlement by the Phoenicians, who cultivated cereals, pulses, grapes, figs, and pomegranates. Known primarily as maritime traders, the Phoenicians introduced olives to Spain around 1050 B.C. However, it was the Romans who developed olive production into a major crop for the region along with grapes to supply oil and wine to their legions. From the eight to fifteenth centuries A.D., irrigation systems were advanced and new crops such as almonds, citrus, artichokes, and eggplants were introduced under Muslim rule.
Many of these crops, most notably olives, citrus, and almonds, remain a major component of the region’s agriculture today. But in the late twentieth century, modernization led to the increased loss of small family farms and encouraged larger, industrial operations, as can be seen the world over. More recently, the Andalusian countryside has also seen solar farms sprouting in its fields. Yet another familiar tale.
But most of the people who inhabit the rural areas of southern Spain do not make their homes on the land itself. Instead, they cluster together in the rural towns, largely in apartments, as do the people living in the larger cities. There are no suburbs, as we have in the United States. There is comparatively little sprawl. The people are content to be tightly packed in villages, towns, and cities, leaving the land outside these bounds largely to its primary use of growing food.
Empty Spain is a topic of curiosity for many people. It is often attributed primarily to the push for industrialization and urbanization by Franco following the Spanish Civil War. People, particularly Spain’s youth, left the rural areas for better economic opportunities in the cities, a trend which intensified during the latter half of the twentieth century following the transition to democracy in the 1970s. It is a familiar story throughout the Western world.
The most often quoted source on the subject as it relates to Spain is Sergio del Molino’s 2016 book, La Espana Vacia. I haven’t read the book because it is only available in Spanish, but according to English summaries, Del Molino suggests Spain’s rural depopulation is a result of multiple factors, including the Christian reconquest of Spain from Muslim rule in the fifteenth century, challenging geography and climate in some regions, lack of economic opportunity in rural areas, concentration of political power and resources in urban centers, limited cultural experiences and amenities in rural areas, etc. Many of these factors can explain similar phenomena in much of Europe, as well as the drying up of rural towns in the United States.
But there seems to be something different and more complex about Spain. If you look at population maps for the rest of Europe, you will see that its rural population is spread relatively evenly over the land. The rural population of Spain, however, is clustered tightly into the many small, rural towns and villages, while the countryside is composed of largely unpopulated farmland, just as I have observed in southern Spain. What is the difference? Some claim that this phenomenon results from the long history of large-scale agriculture in Spain. Following the long Christian reconquest of Spain, occurring over a period spanning 711-1492, the Kingdom of Castile awarded vast holdings of land to the Spanish nobility, knights, and mercenary soldiers who helped hand them the final victory over the centuries-long Muslim rule.
Those awarded these lands were encouraged to rule them in a way modeled on the earlier Roman “latifundium,” a Latin word meaning “farm” or “estate.” It was a term used to describe the large estates of the wealthy, including Roman senators. These large estates produced olive oil, wine, and grain. The land was owned by the very wealthy or politically connected and was worked by the poor and the enslaved. These holdings snowballed as consolidation led to greater economies of scale, increased productivity, and more wealth for the owners in this ancient version of what we today know as industrialized agriculture. Pliny the Elder was a noted critic of the latifundium, arguing that it would ruin the Roman provinces as it had Italy. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Between 206 and 19 B.C., the Romans gradually conquered the Iberian peninsula. It was divided into three provinces, Lusitania, Tarraconensis, and Baetica. The last of these, also known as Hispania Baetica, corresponding to modern day Andalusia, became the commercial center of wheat and olive oil on the new latifundia of Hispania. The Kingdom of Castile mimicked this same system following the Reconquesta many years later.
Andalusia has long been the breadbasket of the Iberian peninsula. Today the land in the region is owned primarily by the wealthy, many of whom live in cities like Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, or, to a lesser extent in the rural villages themselves, but almost no one who owns the land lives on the land itself. Management decisions are often made by agricultural advisors and consultants rather than landowners. The boots on the ground, field work of agriculture is conducted by the working class and, to an increasing extent, immigrant labor. All of this is a very similar scenario to that which we see in the U.S. Interestingly, latifundia were also established in Egypt, northern Africa, Sicily, and Greece. Today both Sicily and Greece bear the same pattern of an empty countryside surrounding the population centers of small, rural villages.
While it makes sense that the old latifundium may play a foundational role in the patterns of human land use in these regions, a lot of time has passed since the Roman conquest of Iberia and centuries later the Reconquista. I believe there are other forces at play.
The Spanish Civil War was a three-year conflict in the late 1930s, that resulted in the rise of Francisco Franco, whose authoritarian regime ruled Spain until his death in 1975, whereafter democracy came to Spain in the form of constitutional monarchy. Franco’s rule was bloody, brutal, and controversial. It also ushered in industrialization, growing cities, foreign investment, liberalization, and mass tourism along the Spanish coast. The agricultural legacy of Franco’s rule is marked largely by development of irrigation, roads, and electricity in rural Spain and introduction of industrial technologies to Spanish agriculture.
Prior to the Spanish Civil War, landholdings remained in the hands of the wealthy even after many noble families sold portions of their estates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In southern Spain, where landlessness was most prevalent, fewer than 1% of the largest landowners held more than 50% of the land. In an effort to establish rural political stability and increase agricultural production, Franco purchased portions of large landholdings and devoted more land to agriculture. From 1940 to the early 1970s, the Spanish government embarked upon an experiment in social engineering, creating nearly 300 new rural towns throughout Spain. They built new housing, irrigation systems, and other infrastructure, re-settling nearly 200,000 families on nearly 2.5 million acres. Settlers were granted local land access. Monitored by the government through a period of “guardianship,” settlers did not hold property rights and were indebted to the government. There was much fear and intimidation involved, as land and livelihood were held over settlers’ heads.
Even before the arrival of democracy, plot size increased over time as the government policy shifted from a “peasant model” of settlement on small tracts to a “business/producer model” that emphasized agricultural self-sufficiency and required greater resources. Thus land, at least in certain regions, found itself once more concentrated into the hands of those with the financial resources to manage it according to this model of large-scale agriculture. This same model has remained mostly intact under democracy, perpetuating the empty countryside and full towns, both large and small. This, coupled with strict zoning laws regarding building on agricultural land, has preserved the countryside unto itself. But there is still more to this complex story.
I do not attempt to judge the wonderful Spanish people for their seeming abandonment of the countryside as a place to live. A deep respect and care for the land is evident in even the most urban of the Spanish people whom I have met. Just outside many cities and towns, from Seville to Lora Del Rio, there are large sectioned off areas divided into hundreds of small garden spaces, where the townspeople maintain their deep connections with the land and knowledge of where their food comes from.
But unlike Americans they choose, personally, socially, and politically, not to live in self-imposed isolation upon the rural landscape. It is this difference between the European and American attitudes about living in town vs on the land itself that I find most fascinating. Although I am too much of a rural American to believe that living in an apartment in town would suit me, I see merit in how it is done in Spain. It is healthy in many ways. It encourages the positive benefits of community and social life, while at the same time preserving the unsullied beauty of the rural countryside.
When I ask the people I know in southern Spain about choosing to live in the cities or towns rather than the countryside, other reasons arise. As we walk orchard rows, drive the Andalusian countryside, drink wine and dine on tapas like jamon and tostados con tomate, or sit down to jovial meals of paella and torrijas, they explain their side of the story. My friends—crop consultants, school teachers, lawyers, housewives, and farm workers—describe their concerns about the lack of services, medical facilities, and job opportunities in rural areas. We have the same issues in rural America, yet many of us who choose to live in rural America prefer our elbow room to city life. Perhaps we are more willing to do so because of our automobile culture, allowing us to get wherever we need to be, whenever we want to go, on our own schedules. This also comes with negative side effects like sprawl, loss of farmland and greenspace, and excessive amounts of time spent confined to automobiles.
Attitudes in Spain about people who live in their rural countryside also encourage city or town life. Farm dwellers in some areas of Spain carry a negative stigma of poverty, decay, and hopelessness. But by and large, the reasons most of my Spanish friends give for living clustered in concentrated populations center largely around the value of social life in Spanish culture.
The Spanish, and indeed many other European cultures, gather together daily as friends and family to enjoy meals, tapas, and drinks. Special occasions like Easter and other holiday festivals are focused upon gathering in extended celebration together. In Seville I noticed that each evening teenagers in that ubiquitous quest for freedom from parents do not retreat to their bedrooms as American teenagers do. They gather on the sidewalks below their apartment buildings. They aren’t causing trouble, nor do they harass people, nor are they getting into any harmful mischief. I’m sure misbehavior happens in certain places, at certain times, but I never saw it. The teenagers of Spain simply cluster together to talk and laugh of the things teenagers everywhere find so seemingly important at any given moment.
On one night in the little town of Palma Del Rio, my friends and I went to dinner at a local restaurant. I stuffed myself with jamon and course after delicious course of Spanish food. About half-way through our meal, a young gentleman in his early 30s approached the small stage in front of us. He set up a guitar stand and rested a nylon-stringed guitar upon it. Soon the room began to fill, wall to wall, with locals over the age of 65. The young man took the stage once more, gave greetings, and introduced the guitarist. Then, one by one, local men, got up and took turns singing Flamenco songs in a sort of local open-mic night. The people clapped, laughed, cried, and sang along while wine flowed. It was a beautiful thing to see a community share and, I thought, a perfect example of why the Spanish people cluster together as they do.
Science tells us of the importance of human relationships. In study after study, socializing has been strongly linked to longer human lives. In popular culture, the term “Blue Zones” refers to regions where people live exceptionally long lives. The five primary “Blue Zones” include Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. Each of these places have several things in common: cultures characterized by physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole foods diet, and low disease incidence. While the “Blue Zones” get all the media attention, they are not the only places whose populations benefit from these cultural traits. Studies of human health and life expectancy since 1900 have demonstrated that full social participation is a fundamental human need, and in its absence the odds of death rise by 50%. The Spanish lifestyle embraces such interaction, although not with the reductionistic goal of extending life. The sense of community in this part of the world is a major thread holding the fabric of their culture together. They embrace socialization simply for the joy of it. And life expectancy in Spain is 83 years. In the United States, it is 77.
There are regions of Spain where the emptying of the countryside is less noticeable. As you ascend into the Sierra Morena mountains above Seville, a section called the Sierra Norte de Sevilla, you pass through the town of Castillana and leave the intensive cultivation of citrus, almonds, and olives below for an older landscape. In these low mountains, there are old, gnarled olive trees, cork and holm oaks, and livestock: Iberian pigs (from which jamon is made), cattle, and sheep. These are the marks of an ancient silvopastural tradition, known as the Dehesa. This system used for grazing, forestry, agriculture, cork extraction, hunting, and shepherding is considered one of the most harmonious and sustainable forms of land use invented by humans. Here people do occupy the countryside on smaller parcels, largely to care for the animals. But here you will also find the same cultural traditions in which the people enjoy gathering together. They maintain a strong connection to traditional practices, land use, folklore, and oral traditions including stories of bandits, giant snakes, and children raised by wolves. Even those estates owned by people who live in the cities seem to have houses on the land that the families still cherish and use on weekends and holidays.
Spain is a fascinating place for someone interested in the relationships between people and land. These relationships are inevitably shaped by history. Comparisons with the landscape and culture of my home in rural Georgia reveal stark differences in climate, in the land itself, as well as in the cultures of each place. In the part of the world I’m from, it is still the dream of most people to live on a place of their own in the countryside surrounded by woods and fields, away from the hustle and bluster of the urban lifestyle. But beneath the obvious differences, I see similarities. Even though many of us in the U.S. want to live in the countryside, there remains a bias in certain circles that assumes the rural dweller is a backwoods hick. Farmland is increasingly concentrated into the hands of the wealthy. The same market forces and economies of scale that drive this consolidation in Spain make it hard for small farmers in the U.S. to survive and hold on to their land. We’ve each arrived here by different paths, but we have both arrived here nonetheless.
Like most places, the Spanish form of land use results from a combination of history, politics, and social attitudes toward the land. Does the future of our lifestyle and culture in the U.S. look like that of Spain? As we continue to see young people leave the small, rural towns of America for greater opportunity in larger towns and cities, as each subsequent generation’s culture grows more isolated from the land, will we further depopulate our own countryside and concentrate ourselves in cities and towns? What would an American version of this mean for our own culture, our land, and the relationship that exists between the two? It is hard to say. Americans, as we know, are fiercely independent. A plot of land of one’s own is what drove the American experiment from the beginning. It is difficult to envision it any other way.
As for me, I don’t know that I could ever be happy living in an apartment in town. My own culture, for good or bad, has fostered this attitude. But I see great merit in the way the Spanish live their lives. Who am I to doubt the preservation of community and the appreciation for a life spent in fellowship with others that I have witnessed in Spain? There are tradeoffs. Their rural lands are free of McMansions and tract housing developments, but how many of them have unfettered access to forests, fields, wild lands, or the creek lying 200 yards from their backdoor? Though we may choose to live out our lives differently upon the land, there remain in both places people who still care for and respect land and community. I have learned much from the Spanish way of life that I hope to apply to my own life, in a way appropriate to my place and culture.
While their countryside may be empty, I have found the hearts and lives of the Spanish people to be full.
Image Credit: Diego Delso
