The acting Ombudsman of Spain, Francisco Fernández Marugán, has initiated an action with the Government Commissioner against the demographic challenge and with the Autonomous Communities of Aragón, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y León, Cataluña, Comunidad Valenciana, Extremadura, Galicia and La Rioja, to learn about the plans and actions managed by the administrations in order to face the demographic challenge and begin to reverse the situation in the so-called “Empty Spain”.
The Institution is particularly concerned about the difficulty that the inhabitants of the most unpopulated areas may find when accessing basic services such as health, education, transport, banking, and good coverage of broadband networks.
Thus, in recent years it has undertaken various actions on the quality of public health and education services, on financial exclusion due to the lack of ATMs and branches in small towns, and due to the isolation generated by the lack of adequate infrastructure to access certain places or by a deficient provision of telecommunications services.
For the Ombudsman, the regression of the population and the difficulty in accessing basic services lead to poverty and inequality and warns that citizens cannot be treated differently depending on where they live.
In its letter to the administrations concerned, the Institution recalls that Article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union establishes the need to reduce the differences between the levels of development of the various regions and the backwardness of the least favored regions. Among them, the Treaty identifies rural areas, areas affected by industrial transition and regions suffering from severe and permanent natural or demographic handicaps, such as the northernmost regions with low population density and island, cross-border and mountain regions.
The Ombudsman met at the end of November with representatives of the Association for the Development of the Celtiberian Highlands, a body that calls for measures to combat depopulation in Spain.
According to experts of this association, the sparsely populated areas of Spain, defined as “Spanish Lapland”, are 10, which encompass 4,375 municipalities, occupy 53% of the territory, and have a density less than 12, 5 inhabitants per square kilometer. Such figures lead Spain to lead the phenomenon of depopulation in Europe.
