The doctor visits once a week in Sayatón, an hour from Madrid. In the 28 April elections, vanishing towns like this could be a key issue

Just over an hour’s drive from Madrid, well beyond the industrial estates and retail parks that orbit the Spanish capital and off a main road that climbs and falls with ear-popping regularity, lies a small town that is slowly fading from the map.

Little stirs in Sayatón on a weekday morning besides the wind that whips the town hall flags and the cockerel whose crow bounces off the facades of houses, some shut up against the winter, others in varying states of decay.

But then there is little left here to stir.

After clinging to a hilltop in Castilla-La Mancha for 500 years, Sayatón, like most tiny rural Spanish towns, is suffering the slow, steady ravages of depopulation, a phenomenon that threatens more than half of the country’s surface area.

When María Angeles Rosado first arrived in Sayatón two decades ago, it was home to 150 people, had a shop, a bar, and even a daily bus service to Madrid and Guadalajara.

Quick guide Depopulation in Europe Show Hide In many parts of Europe, the issue of depopulation of the countryside, regions, or in some cases whole countries, weighs on the minds of politicians and the public, as an era of freedom of movement means more people are able to migrate to find better opportunities. A recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations showed that in Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary and Romania, countries where the population has either declined sharply or is flatlining, more people are worried about emigration than they are about immigration. The problem is felt acutely in central and eastern Europe, where populations have shrunk dramatically in the decades since the fall of communism, due in part to the traumatic effects of the transition, with high mortality rates, low birth rates, and millions of people travelling to western Europe to seek higher salaries, especially in the years after EU accession. In Bulgaria, for example, the population has shrunk from 9 million to 7 million since 1989.

Today, its population has dwindled to 50 people – among them just seven children – and the large, chilly bar is, along with the pharmacy, all that remains of the town’s turn-of-the-20th-century glories.

Life in Sayatón nowadays, says Rosado, is governed by the calendar.

“The doctor and nurse come for an hour on Tuesday mornings. The butcher comes once a month, the fruit and veg guy comes once a week and so does the frozen food guy. There used to be someone who came to sell household cleaning products, but not any more.”

Rosado, a 39-year-old politics graduate turned farmer, has found herself the unofficial face of the so-called España vacía (empty Spain) thanks to a tweet sent on New Year’s Eve.

Above a selfie taken in the cab of her tractor that morning, she wrote: “Finishing up the sowing. Mother, young farmer in Sayatón … where there’s no school or paediatrician, and only a doctor for an hour a week. And here we are, a smile on our face, growing food for the world.”

Mª Ángeles Rosado (@gelesrosado) Terminando de sembrar.

Madre, jóven agricultora en Sayatón, pequeño municipio de 50 habitantes de Guadalajara, junto a la Sierra de Altomira, Red Natura 2000, sin colegio ni pediatra, médico una hora a la semana.

Y aquí seguimos, con una sonrisa, dando de comer al mundo. pic.twitter.com/6CdlHHaKHY

The photo was meant mainly for her children, who were staying with their grandmother while their parents worked between Christmas and the Epiphany.

But the tweet soon found a larger audience. As well as getting more than 4,000 retweets and 15,000 likes, it has made Rosado a minor celebrity and helped focus attention on Sayatón and the wider problem of depopulation.

The village isn’t dying; the people are María Luisa Baños, Sayatón resident

According to Spain’s ministry for territorial policy, 90% of the country’s population – about 42 million people – is packed into 1,500 towns and cities that occupy 30% of the land. The other 10% (4.6 million people) occupy the remaining 70%, giving a population density of barely 14 inhabitants per square kilometre.

Over the past eight years, 80% of Spanish municipalities have experienced population falls – a figure that rises to 90% for towns and villages like Sayatón, which have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.

La España vacía could also play an important role in this month’s general election.

At the end of March, tens of thousands of people marched through the centre of Madrid to demand action on the issue. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has promised to fill the gaps with opportunities as his socialist party vies with its conservative rival, the People’s party (PP), to woo rural voters.

And, after decades of dominance, the PP could see its countryside vote badly eroded by the centre-right Citizens party and the upstart, far-right Vox party, which has been banging the drum for hunting and bullfighting. The sudden proliferation of rightwing parties could split the vote and end up helping the socialists win more seats.

Rosado’s snap may also have helped launch a political career: she recently announced that she would run as a candidate for the Citizens party in the election.

“For decades or even centuries, there’s been a lack of interest from governments when it comes to areas like this,” she says. “If there had been some, we wouldn’t have seen so much depopulation.”

Investment, she says, tends to go where there are more people – which is why Madrid, Catalonia and coastal areas secure funding at the expense of regions such as Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y Leon and Extremadura.

“We’re an hour from Madrid but you can see the massive difference between Madrid and its outskirts and towns and villages like this,” says Rosado.

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“I just want them to guarantee basic services – education and health – at the very least in the bigger towns.”

She says the government could do more to halt depopulation by introducing tax breaks and incentivising civil servants, doctors and teachers to move to rural areas to live and work.

For María Luisa Baños, who has lived in Sayatón for 34 of her 62 years, the town’s decline is a simple matter of economics and demographics.

“A lot of young people have left because we’ve got nothing to offer them,” she says. “They’ve gone where the work is and made their lives and families there.”

Baños concedes that the people of Sayatón could perhaps have done more to safeguard its future – “we had a little shop and we didn’t make the most of it; people got into their cars instead and drove to the big supermarkets” – but fears they can now do little in the face of mortality and apathy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A view of the main road into Sayatón. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

“The village isn’t dying; the people are,” she says. “The village could move forward if the people in power were interested in our lives, our economic situation or our safety.”

Isaura Leal, the government commissioner tasked with tackling the demographic challenge through a national strategy, points out that depopulation is not a recent phenomenon.

“It’s the consequence of a process that’s been going on for decades and which reached a critical point in the middle of the last century,” says Leal.

“But it’s also intensified over the past decade because of the impact of the economic crisis, which most directly affected young people and women, who had to leave their local areas in search of work and better opportunities and often ended up in big cities.” The strategy seeks to guarantee the provision of basic services across Spain, to ensure adequate digital connectivity and to promote initiatives to drive economic activity.

Others have already struck out on their own. But six members of a collective that has spent the past few years trying to resettle an abandoned village 70 miles north of Sayatón have been given jail sentences and hefty fines after their efforts fell foul of the regional government.

Sayatón has seen the odd newcomer. Among its 50 residents are two Romanian families whose three children now constitute almost half the town’s juvenile population.

Petrut Labis, who is originally from eastern Romania, works with Rosado and her husband on their farm. He arrived in Sayatón 10 years ago with his wife. “When we got here, she started to cry and said, ‘Where have you brought me?’,” he remembers. “But then we got used to it and things are OK.”

Labis acknowledges that life can be tricky – “if you don’t have a car here, then you’re dead” – and that there is little in Sayatón for his 13-year-old son. His eldest, now 20, has already moved to Guadalajara for work. “He has a flat there and doesn’t come back here,” says Labis. “Why would he?”