Raúl Romano is proud of Otones de Benjumea – his village near Segovia, central Spain, where he recently organised a feast for 350 people, together with music and a talk. But Romano does not live in Otones. Nor do the vast majority of the members of the village’s 400-strong corralón cultural association, which organises the annual extravaganza to celebrate the slaughter of pigs and their conversion into cuts of meat, sausages and offal.

Romano lives in Torrejón de la Calzada, a Madrid dormitory town. Most of the others live in Segovia or Spain’s capital, which lies an hour and half away by car. All call this “my village”, but it is really where their parents or grandparents come from – a place of nostalgia and identity, not of daily life. At most, some have kept up a family house (rather then letting it fall down – since there are no buyers) and spend weekends there. The village’s permanent population has dropped below 40, down by half in two decades. There are no children now. Romano’s mother passed away last month. His father is 96. In a few years’ time only a dozen or so residents will be left.

Yet Otones is not one of those desperate, abandoned Spanish villages waiting to be taken over by hippies, cults or far-right boot camps. A good road and bus route connects it to Segovia, about half an hour away. Madrid is easy to get to. The land is good too, though most farmers live in a nearby town. If Otones has not died, however, it is only because these families have worked hard to stop that happening – returning at weekends and building a clubhouse where the old folks meet daily – and because, three decades ago, a handful of young couples decided to stay and raise families.

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While we were gorging on chorizo and morcilla, Madrid was full of protesters from rural areas, demanding government action to stop their communities dying. More money, better internet connections and improved transport would all help, they said. Politicians, thinking of tomorrow’s general election , were quick to make big promises – the fate of fading towns and villages has become a key issue for voters. But the truth is that, like their counterparts across Europe, they do not know what to do to arrest rural decline. Where the population is picking up, it is usually because of local initiatives – a new variety of wine, say, or ecotourism.

Spain is not alone. Predominantly rural regions now account for only 28% of Europe’s population. In Spain, Greece and Bulgaria, some regions are shedding population at a rate of 3% or more a year, according to the EU’s Espon territorial observatory. Elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, growth in “rural population” is really the hidden growth of gas-guzzling rural commuter belts (the heartland of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters). By 2050, the joint population of all these regions will have fallen by 8 million people while urban areas gain four times that amount.

Since so few of us live in the countryside, we have confused dreams with reality. We love the English yeoman farmer, but it is Poles and Lithuanians who pick English vegetables. The payés peasant stands tall as a symbol of Catalan identity, but it is Moroccans and Algerians who work the fields of Catalonia. Where the Spanish countryside thrives most, such as in southern Almería, it may be under plastic canopies with plants fed by hydroponic drips. Legalising marijuana would do more for farming in some areas than Brussels subsidies.

Spanish villages are emptying because fewer people want to live in them. It is perfectly feasible to commute daily from Otones to Segovia, but that means living without shops, bars, cinemas, streetlife and bustle. Netflix and homeworking are no substitute.

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Even environmental arguments make little sense. Carbon footprints are smaller in cities where you walk everywhere, or catch public transport, and live in a small apartment which is efficient to heat and shares services. You have to be a full-time ecowarrior, ready to chop your own wood and eat from your land, to compete with that. France’s gilets jaunes protests – sparked by an eco-fuel tax that punished country-dwellers – is a perfect example of the dilemma.

Even then, committed environmentalists can find rural culture hard to deal with. What happens if you don’t like your neighbour’s hunting rifle or, as friends of mine who left Madrid to build a mud-and-straw-clad home with their own hands found, your children are taken on school trips to bullfight ranches? The countrywoman may dispense rural generosity, but she might also be conservative or reactionary.

The ideal of countryside differs in each nation’s collective imagination. In Britain, a mostly densely populated country where a town is rarely far away and privacy is valued, people dream of isolated homes and views of hills or fields. In Spain and other parts of southern Europe, the charm of rural life is not about open spaces but the closeness of people, jammed together in tight-knit communities, with children running freely down village streets that are watched over by adults who are assumed to be friendly, not threatening. In such communities, indeed, social relations supersede political difference.

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The challenge everywhere is to reimagine the countryside. Is it to become, in the sort of post-Brexit Cumbrian dystopia pictured by Tory remainer Rory Stewart in Prospect magazine recently – a parkland for the wealthy’s second homes, like many a pretty Cornish village? Is there a future beyond the rapaciousness of agrobusinesses and the vacuity of twee tourism?

For whoever forms the next Spanish government, and around Europe, any reimagining will require both creativity and tough love, based on realistic assumptions of what “rural” means in a mostly “urban” world. In the meantime, a place such as Otones that looks after its elderly and offers the warmth and continuance of community to those whose families have moved away – including the great-grandchildren of those now using wheelchairs – is not a bad alternative.

• Giles Tremlett is a correspondent based in Spain