Native population in the Spanish interior is shrinking but new arrivals are helping keep village schools and farms running

With its abandoned houses, empty streets and ageing, shrinking population, Visiedo in northern Spain could be the poster village for European rural decline.

On sunny days it looks like the set of a spaghetti western. Its streets are home to more dilapidated brick houses than people and you’re as likely to come across a tractor than a car.

But salvation may be at hand, and from an unlikely quarter. The Spanish interior may be slowly dying but there is one class of people ready and willing to help bring about a revival: immigrants.

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Take Said al-Ghoury. Visiedo did, and thanks to his arrival with his wife and two daughters, the village’s school was able to remain open.



“I’m delighted to be here,” says Ghoury, 43. He had needed a job, and the town had needed his daughters, 12-year-old Yassmin and eight-year-old Fidaf. He now works as a handyman for the council, and his wife, Omkeltoum, is expecting another child.

“His arrival has been a huge boon for the town,” says the mayor, María Ángeles Zaera. Although there are 136 people on the local register, she says, only 80 live in the village.

Visiedo is located in one of the emptiest reaches of Spain, the province of Teruel, part of the autonomous community of Aragon, which has the highest rate of rural depopulation in the country.

There are two other Moroccan families in Visiedo, whose children share a classroom with Yassmin and Fidaf, and more in the surrounding areas.

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In Teruel province, the number of immigrant residents has grown by more than 2,000% since 1998. Figures from the Institute of National Statistics show there are 13,979 foreigners in the province now, while the Spanish population of the area has fallen from 136,229 to 123,009 over the past 19 years.

Rosario Sampedro, an expert in rural sociology and migration at the University of Valladolid, says foreigners started to arrive in the Spanish countryside in the 1990s to work as day labourers in the intensive agricultural industry on the Mediterranean coast. A decade later, they started to head further inland.

“This has brought about a kind of population regeneration in some areas,” she says. “And that repopulation is thanks to immigrants – although the situation in more remote areas is still very difficult and has been worsened by the economic crisis.”

In Teruel, which comes 10th on the list of Spain’s most rapidly ageing provinces, around a third of the population is over 60.

Ghoury has never lived in such a small place. If it hadn’t been for the economic crisis, he and his family would have stayed in Barcelona, the city he first arrived in almost 20 years ago.

“I came here in search of the European dream,” he says. “But I ended up unemployed.”

He and his family arrived in the Teruel countryside thanks to the Cepaim Foundation’s New Paths programme, which helps bring immigrants to depopulated rural areas.

“It’s pretty interesting to turn a dead town into a living one,” says Vicente Gonzalvo, the foundation’s regional representative. “It’s really important that the people who were born in these rural areas realise that new residents are absolutely fundamental for them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hassan Bellahmama, a shepherd, near Alfambra. Photograph: Víctor Sainz/El País

Less than 15 miles from Ghoury lives his compatriot Hassan Bellahmama. Each day Bellahmama takes a flock of 1,000 sheep out to graze in the fields that surround Alfambra, a village of a little over 500 people.

Originally from rural Kelaa, near Marrakesh, Bellahmama came to Spain at the age of 19 with a signed shepherd’s contract in his pocket. Now, after 11 years based in the country, he has no plans to leave and has just got permission to bring his wife and 18-month-old son over from Morocco.

Two of his brothers were already living in Alfambra when he arrived and another is in Zaragoza. All three of them are shepherds.

“There are very few Spaniards for this kind of work,” says Bellahmama’s boss, Pedro José Escusa.

It’s a big problem for a region that accounted for 9% of Spain’s total agricultural production in 2013.

“Like all the other farmers here, I started employing immigrants around 15 years ago,” says Escusa. The majority of the workforce is Moroccan, Pakistani and Romanian.

Rural areas face a vicious circle: there are no services without a population and no population without services.

“It’s really difficult,” says Zaera. “If we had a factory or something similar to offer, we’d be better off. But no matter how hard you struggle, all you can do is keep going instead of growing.”

At least her village has Ghoury and his family putting down roots. His daughters, born to Moroccan parents in Barcelona, are Spanish and quick to tell people where they’re from.

“Perhaps they now feel they’re from here,” says Ghoury proudly.

Laura Delle Femmine is a reporter for El Pais. This article was shared with the Guardian as part of the New Arrivals project.