An abandoned town is, in many ways, a treasure: its very location, the stories of the people who lived in it, their way of seeing life, their utensils, Spain's past. Each one keeps its secrets, and we have managed to reveal some.

Peñazcurna, for example, in the province of Soria, at first glance seems like a town that had to be made up of humble people, where routine must have been the dominant trend. It is a place where you do not usually stop if you go by car looking for an interesting place. And yet, its inhabitants filled it with treasures.

There are endless objects of daily use whose beauty surprises. We photographed them as they were, without moving anything from its place. Inhabitants of this town raised the everyday to the category of art. Only an intricate tangle of brambles surrounding the town has allowed its conservation.

The main object of this book is to show those hidden treasures in plain sight, which are only waiting to be discovered by someone who knows how to look for them. Treasures such as the daily life of towns that end up being forgotten, human experiences, ancient trades... In short, the human adventure, the greatest of all treasures.

Sometimes a treasure seems easy to reach. Just reach out and pick it up. And yet it is like the moon, so close and so far at the same time.

The town of Vea, also located in the province of Soria, teaches not to trust appearances. If you look at the general photo of the town, it seems that getting there is a matter of a short walk. Only after several attempts is it evident that the brambles impose their presence. If they are set on fire, the town burns, destroying what we are after. The option is to open a tunnel through the brambles with machetes.

The surprise appears when, after passing the wall of brambles and reaching the first house, a new wall of brambles prevents reaching the next. After going around the village several times, you realize that you can enter from the upper part of it, but following your own rules: you can approach the first house, but you can only go through it, which can be very difficult. dangerous since, as a general rule, entering an abandoned house involves an extremely high risk.

How do you advance in a town through the houses? Most of the houses in Vea are on a slope, and have three floors, so that when you enter from the upper floor, you can access another part of the town by exiting through the main door, on the first floor. It is then discovered that the brambles grow only on dirt streets, those that go from top to bottom. But the streets that are at the same height have been paved, and only grass grows, so you can walk along them without any problem.

In this way you can access different areas of the town by moving between the houses. But it is still a dangerous and partial solution, since it is possible to get trapped in a building, and the brambles always appear again.

Without a doubt, the best option is to clean the streets, secure the houses that are at risk of collapsing, and recover its past.

But what past can be recovered if its inhabitants are not the ones who do these tasks? They made the town exist, that it has or at least had a reason for being. Only they can offer a complete vision of what happened. And they are the owners of the houses. Nobody gives away towns, nobody gives away houses. But there are always formulas for those who want to rehabilitate one of these locations. Some examples are shown in the second part of this book.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons of abandoned towns is that they confront human beings with their limitations. From the prologue of the book On Love and Other Demons, by Gabriel García Márquez (Cartagena de Indias, 1994):

October 26 was not a day of great news. Master Clemente Manuel Zabala, editor in chief of the newspaper where I wrote my first letters as a reporter, ended the morning meeting with two or three routine suggestions.
He did not entrust any specific task to any editor. Minutes later he found out by phone that they were emptying the funerary crypts of the old convent of Santa Clara, and he ordered me without illusions: "Take a walk over there and see what comes to your mind."
The historic Poor Clares convent, converted into a hospital a century ago, was to be sold to build a five-star hotel in its place. Its beautiful chapel was almost out in the open due to the gradual collapse of the roof, but three generations of bishops and abbesses and other important people remained buried in its crypts. The first step was to vacate them, deliver the remains to those who claimed it, and throw the balance in the common grave.
I was surprised by the primitiveness of the method. The workers uncovered the graves with a pickaxe and hoe, took out the rotten coffins that fell apart just by moving them, and separated the bones from the mazacote with shreds of clothing and withered hair.
The more illustrious the dead person, the more arduous the work, because it was necessary to dig through the rubble of the bodies and sift their residues finer to rescue the precious stones and goldsmith's garments.
The master builder copied the data from the tombstone into a school notebook, arranged the bones in separate piles, and put the sheet with the name on top of each one so they wouldn't get confused. So my first sight as I entered the temple was a long row of bone mounds, warmed by the barbaric October sun streaming through the portholes in the roof, and with no identity other than the name penciled on a piece of paper. Almost half a century later I still feel the stupor caused by that terrible testimony of the devastating passing of the years.

Historians call the facts that narrate the life of ordinary people, the fine print, intrahistory. Only four geographic-historical dictionaries have been written in the 170 years reflecting the life of the small towns of Spain*. They do not cover all the localities, but they have the merit of having taken a picture of the daily life of ordinary Spaniards who, for the most part, were from the village.

• Sebastián de Miñano wrote between 1826 and 1829 his Geographical-Statistical Dictionary of Spain and Portugal, in 11 volumes; Pascual Madoz, perhaps the best known, wrote his Dictionary Geographical-Statistical-Historical of Spain and its overseas possessions between 1848 and 1850, in 16 volumes; Between 1881 and 1887, Pablo Riera y Sans wrote his Geographical, Statistical, Historical, Biographical, Postal, Municipal, Military, Maritime and Ecclesiastical Dictionary of Spain and its Overseas Possessions, in 11 volumes; and, finally, Rafael Sánchez Mazas wrote between 1956 and 1961 his Geographic Dictionary of Spain.

Of course, countless books and articles on daily life in most Spanish towns have also been published. Town halls and savings banks stand out in this regard. And one of the great values ​​of these publications is precisely this, reflecting normality in all its richness.

Perhaps what is striking about the dictionaries cited is that they portray everyday life on a larger scale, and that allows a better approach to the feeling of a time.

For this reason, the last inhabitants of the abandoned towns that have been visited have been interviewed. They often reside in the municipality closest to the abandoned place, and to which they legally belong. It is curious, a town is abandoned, but some of its inhabitants remain in the surroundings, as if the abandonment was not consummated.

These brief interviews served to bring a mute place to life. No matter how good your intuition, no matter how good a visitor's insight, you never see a town the same way after hearing the stories of at least one person who used to live there. What's more, a strange sensation appears, from which the listener is not able to get rid of: the place begins to make sense, and you can no longer see a desolate town. It has come to life, and that feeling will accompany whenever that place is evoked.

However, in a talk of one or two hours, only a few brushstrokes of what life was like in a certain town appear. If one takes more time, more surprises are bound to emerge: some things that are taken for granted are suddenly called into question. The treasures now appear in the form of new horizons, broader human horizons.

Exploring an abandoned town, he finds an undiscovered ocean whose limits cannot be seen. And this is probably the greatest treasure of all: the human adventure. The history of mankind is written in small print.

How many towns have been abandoned in Spain in the 20th century? There is no published study that answers that question. According to the National Institute of Statistics, in 1900 there were 9,267 municipalities in Spain, 8,098 in 1998, that is, 1,168 less.

Some of them have merged with others to better pay for the services they offer to citizens, such as Chillarón de Cuenca, created from the union of Arcos de la Cantera and Chillarón de Cuenca in 1970. Others have come to belong to a municipality greater for the same reason, such as Barajas or Vallecas, now districts of Madrid. And other localities have been separated from the municipality to which they belonged, such as El Ejido with respect to Dalías, in Almería.

Paulino García Fernández has registered the municipalities that legally disappeared in the 20th century, above all, to group the resident population in each municipality according to its current geographic space, not the one it has had throughout the century*. But this enormous work does not allow knowing the real number of abandoned municipalities, since it only records legal variations and the existing populations within the municipal terms of 1991. But this information does not allow knowing where the population resides within the municipality.

• García Fernández: List of municipalities that have disappeared since the beginning of the century, INE, 1981, and De facto population of the municipalities of Spain according to the geographical configuration of the 1991 Census, FIES.

Every ten years a population census is carried out. From there, the gazetteer , in which the population of each locality appears. García Fernández suggests that in order to find out how many municipalities have disappeared, the best thing to do is to observe which ones are losing their population throughout the century and make a call to the municipality to which it now belongs to verify that, in fact, no one lives there.

The problem is that Spanish municipalities usually have more than one town. The province where a municipality is equivalent to a town, with its town hall, its church and its fields, is rare. The normal is the opposite: about three locations per jurisdiction. Many municipalities have districts (administrative subdivisions) located in other towns within their term, to serve the citizen directly. And even then it is not enough to know where the population lives.

For this reason, the National Institute of Statistics uses what it calls a population nucleus: "a set of at least ten buildings, which are forming streets, squares and other urban thoroughfares. As an exception, the number of buildings may be less than ten, provided that the population that inhabits them exceeds 50 inhabitants. Included in the core are those buildings that, being isolated, are less than 200 meters from the outer limits of the aforementioned complex." The population center is the closest thing to what we usually understand as a town.

Well, in 1991 there were 8,097 municipalities and 36,411 population centers in Spain. To complicate it even more, the INE calls any inhabitable area of ​​the same population singular entity, differentiated from the rest and with its own name. In 1991 there were 61,198, of which a large part did not have any population center because the dwellings were widely scattered.

Curling the loop, it should be noted that numerous populations abandoned in the 20th century did not have the category of municipality, but were districts of other larger nuclei. But it usually happens with relative frequency that these districts were important towns in other centuries. For example, Fuentes (province of Segovia) was more important than Carbonero el Mayor, to whom it belonged. The same happens with Oreja (province of Toledo), with respect to Aranjuez. That is to say, the village of this century could even have been a city in another era, and it has also disappeared.

Desperation comes when it comes to defining what an abandoned town is. It has been decided to choose a simple answer: that place that has houses and streets, but where no one ever sleeps or works. Neither on weekends nor on holidays (except perhaps a shepherd who occasionally uses a building as a shed for his sheep or goats).

When carrying out this work, it has been possible to have some partial data from the authors, which allow a timid approach to the question of the number of uninhabited towns in the 20th century. José Luis Acín Fanlo speaks of 65 missing municipalities in Aragon; Luis Bartolomé and Ignacio Duque mention three nuclei in the Community of Madrid; Belén Menéndez Solar cites 18 in Asturias; Xavier Campillo i Bessès comments that there are four in the province of Barcelona and another four in Gerona; Albert Villaró speaks of about 40 towns in Lérida; Rafael López Monet cites five in Tarragona; Dennis Neiman speaks of a dozen in Guadalajara and about 50 in Soria; Luis Vicente Elías mentions 26 in La Rioja; José Carlos García estimates that there are a dozen abandoned towns in León, especially in the Bierzo area, to which must be added the 29 that are under a swamp; and Sixto Sánchez Perera speaks of two on the island of El Hierro. The nearly 240 nuclei of Huesca that have at least three houses and that have not been municipalities have not been included, nor the nearly 400 Asturian farmhouses with less than five houses. In addition, the 18 Asturian nuclei mentioned usually have an occasional resident.

So far we have, in total, about 332 towns in 14 provinces, among which are the most affected by depopulation. To these contrasted data, it is worth adding the field experience acquired by Javier Domínguez Angulo who, unlike the previous authors, does not have in-depth knowledge of his area of ​​work. Their forecasts are therefore only a first non-systematic approximation. Specifically, their estimates speak of about 25 towns in Andalusia, concentrated mainly in Almería and Huelva, about five in Murcia and also in the Valencian Community, two in Álava, ten in Cantabria, ten in Navarra and Ávila, two in Salamanca. , one in Zamora, two in Palencia, five in Valladolid, ten in Segovia, thirty in Burgos and two in Cáceres.

None, or practically none, in the Balearic Islands, Seville, Malaga, Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Badajoz and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which does not mean that there are none, but rather that the search carried out did not give results. Regarding Galicia, about 15 villages, plus a large number (several dozen at least) of "places" with more than ten houses.

Adding both data, unequal in their rigor as already mentioned, the final figure is around 550 abandoned towns, most of them small.

It should be noted that the specialists have worked in those regions where there has been a greater depopulation, except for Burgos, Segovia, Pontevedra, Orense and Navarra, so the estimate could rise somewhat more. It is also important to note that it is almost certain that a few hundred more localities could have been mentioned without difficulty by the end of the 1960s, but the return to the field since the end of the 1970s has proven to be a relief for many counties.

It can be deduced from the interviews conducted by the authors that the bulk of the depopulation occurred in the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, and that the main reason was the search for a better life. Although you can never say for sure why someone did something.

Astonishing is the fact that not a single town in the present book has been abandoned by famine. Today like yesterday, a frost can leave an olive grove unproductive for five years, which could cause emigration for a family. But it didn't happen that way. Instead, many of the towns were abandoned due to the development of industry and large cities.

usually called uninhabited , and of which there is usually no evidence today, unlike the abandoned town, which is usually clearly visible for having been uninhabited in more recent times. For eleven years, Luis Bartolomé Marcos and Ignacio Duque Rodríguez have investigated the depopulated areas of the Community of Madrid, from the Middle Ages to the present*.

• Bartolomé Marcos, Duque Rodríguez: In search of the lost terms, Volume I: Depopulated of the Sierra Norte de Madrid.

On the occasion of this work, the two researchers carried out a count of the depopulated in an area equivalent to half of all of Spain (264,000 square kilometers), starting from the Middle Ages. The results, which politely allow us to offer the scoop, are overwhelming: between 6,620 and 9,457 abandoned towns, four out of ten of those existing in this millennium. Surprisingly, and unlike the 20th century, most of the depopulations have occurred in the plain, not in the mountains.

They also state that these data, referring above all to inland Spain, probably cannot be extrapolated to the Cantabrian coast, although they may be to the Mediterranean. Regardless of your study, a provisional figure for the country could be handled, solely for the purpose of trying to obtain general conclusions. If, for example, it is estimated that the number of depopulated has been 11,000 in the last millennium, it would result that the average number of depopulated localities per century rises to 1,100.

With the figures available for the 20th century, also provisional, it is concluded that the material development that has taken place has lowered that average considerably, from 1,100 to 550, almost half. At the end of the sixties it probably reached 700 or 800, but the return to the countryside stopped that process. From this last statement another striking conclusion can be drawn: not only does material development slow down depopulation, but also the disillusionment that development provokes.

They also compared figures from other areas of Europe during the same time period, reaching similar conclusions, almost four out of ten. There are no data regarding the rest of the world, since the subject of the depopulated was only addressed at the world level at the Third Conference on the History of the Economy (Munich, 1965), but the gauntlet is thrown. Perhaps these data allow us to complement the balance of a century and a millennium that have ended.

If the previous millennia have been similar, it turns out that almost half of the places that humanity builds to live are abandoned. Indeed, development during the 20th century, with its large population and high standard of living in some regions that have avoided further depopulation, may not be eternal in the light of history.

A sword of Damocles hangs over many small towns: there are thousands of villages in the country with less than a hundred inhabitants, 21,176 in 1996, and a considerable number live with less than ten people. It is possible in the next 20 years, with the aging of the rural population, greater than in the cities, and, above all, due to the loss of a traditional lifestyle that has lasted 7,000 years in the Iberian Peninsula (agriculture, livestock, craftsmanship), many towns are abandoned at a speed unknown in previous times, or else they become second homes or summer resorts, with the consequent loss of population and identity.

Experience shows that it is much easier to keep a town low for decades than to resurrect a dead town. Perhaps for this reason it is important to bequeath houses to children or grandchildren, so that when the magic of the big city and its high salaries wear off, they can discover that the new treasure is that town where their family came from.