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Thousands protest in Madrid to demand action to combat problems of depopulation

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Tens of thousands of people gathered in Madrid on Sunday to demand an urgent solution to Spain's problem of depopulation. Nearly 100 organizations from 24 provinces took part in the protest, which organizers labeled as the "revolt of an empty Spain." They were demanding a cross-party plan that would help them to continue living in their dwindling villages and provincial capitals.

The protest was organized by depopulation advocacy groups Teruel Existe (Teruel Exists) and Soria ¡Ya!. Many rural protesters from towns in Huesca, Albacete, Zaragoza, Zamora, Ciudad Real, La Rioja, Granada and Jaén came to the Spanish capital to demand access to better infrastructure and services. "We're not asking for a hospital in every town, or an AVE station [a high-speed rail in Spain], or a Maluma concert. We want real things," said Emiliano Antolín, a 38-year-old mechanic from Palencia, a city in northern Spain. "We have internet at the generous speed of three megas. It's impossible to compete with those who have 300."

In Spain, 48% of municipalities have a population density of less than 12.5 inhabitants per square kilometer, a figure that the European Union considers to be very low. Between 2011 and 2017, approximately 62% of towns lost inhabitants, according to government data, and even cities with a population between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants have been in decline in the last decade.

Ahead of the April 28 general elections, electoral campaigns have focused their efforts on these dwindling towns by including measures against depopulation in a bid to win votes. In fact, representatives from parties such as Ciudadanos (Citizens), the Popular Party (PP), Unidas Podemos and Vox attended the protest - but not everyone was happy about their presence."People don't want the politicians here," said Vanessa García, the spokesperson for Soria ¡Ya!. "This is a citizen protest. We are here because of them."

"We are first-class citizens, just like everyone else. I want my town to survive," added Miriam Martín from Piedrahíta, a municipality of Ávila which has 1,800 inhabitants. Martín has been working as a professional rural developer for the past 39 years. "[Politicians] impose solutions with an urban perspective. We want them to listen to us."

"The hemorrhaging will not be stopped. Today in Spain, 26 provincial capitals are losing inhabitants. And if these capitals are declining, imagine what is happening to towns and villages," said journalists Manuel Campo Vidal, the former president of the Television Academy, and Paloma Zuriaga, director of the National Radio of Spain (RNE), who read the protesters' manifesto on Sunday. "We need to react. The revolt of an empty Spain is already in motion and it won't be silenced... Addressing rural Spain, an empty Spain, is a matter of justice."

English version by Asia London Palomba.

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Thousands protest in Madrid to demand action to combat problems of depopulation

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Tens of thousands of people gathered in Madrid on Sunday to demand an urgent solution to Spain's problem of depopulation. Nearly 100 organizations from 24 provinces took part in the protest, which organizers labeled as the "revolt of an empty Spain."

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The movement protests against depopulation, urban-centered policies from the national government, and the lack of infrastructure in their rural regions in Spain.

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Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid Sunday to protest under the campaign of "Empty Spain", a national platform that urges the government to take actions against a growing concern of rural depopulation.

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The movement, initiated by 85 grassroots organizations, has come to be known as the "revolt of an empty Spain". They protest against depopulation, urban-centered policies from the national government, and the lack of infrastructure in their rural regions. All which have created what has come to be known as ghost towns, completely uninhabited villages and rural areas.

"We are first-class citizens, just like everyone else. I want my people to be alive, ", said Miriam Martin, a 39-year-old rural professional who came from Piedrahita, a town in Avila with some 1,800 inhabitants.

The protest turnout estimates range from 50,000 demonstrators, according to authorities, to 100,000 according to organizers, all coming from rural and remote regions throughout 24 provinces of Spain.

"The bleeding does not stop. Today in Spain 26 provincial capitals lose population. And if capitals recede, imagine the fall in the villages. We can not let the rural regions agonize," journalists Manuel Campo Vidal, former president of the Television Academy, and Paloma Zuriaga, director of RNE told El Pais.

A map that shows the red areas are reported less than eight inhabitants per square kilometer. Photo: Izquierda Unida Segovia

The issue can clearly be seen on a map, as 53 percent of the national territory is inhabited by only 5 percent of the population, according to a study by the Research Centre on Depopulation and Development of Rural Areas (Ceddar). In Spain, 48 percent of the municipalities have a population density lower than 12.5 inhabitants per square kilometer, a threshold considered low by the European Union.

And even though the rural population increased between 2000 and 2010, it since has declined to approximately 9,17 million people. From 2011 to 2017, almost 62% of localities lost their neighbors, according to data from the Government Commissioner regarding the Demographic Challenge. But people do not just leave small villages, also from main cities in the country's interior.

For example, the municipality of Molina de Aragon in the Guadalajara province (northwestern Spain) has a population density inferior to Siberia. With 1.63 inhabitants per kilometer, it is the area that suffers the most in this process of depopulation. And the lack of people it's not just the problem.

The affected territories are usually "economically depressed areas that are going backward or show less dynamic economies in contrast to other parts of the country," the Ceddar report states.

Jánovas es un pueblo abandonado de la provincia de #Huesca.

Afectado por la construcción de un embalse que no se llegó a realizar, los vecinos han intentado volver desde entonces a habitarlo, pero la falta de recursos poco a poco va reclamando calles y edificios.#EspañaVaciada pic.twitter.com/6GJE2KhWCD
- refref (@Educo_gratis) March 31, 2019

Janovas is an abandoned village in the province of #Huesca.

The problem resides also in a demographic change in the country. Spain's fertility rate of 1.3 percent in 2017 was the second-lowest in the EU, after Malta, and the gap in the country between urban and rural births is one of the widest in the bloc. This lack of young people means the population isn't replenished in order to generate functional local economies, pushing people towards bigger urban cities.

Yet as rural Spaniards protest, business has taken advantage. According to the realtor Aldeas Abandonadas (Abandoned Villages), there are about 1,500 discarded hamlets in Spain, which are now been put on sale for as less than US$100,000.

These large land properties are been bought as secondary investments changing the agricultural production dynamic they once had. Something organizers have warned, stating the fact that food for the big cities come from rural land.

This new wave of manifestations come as Spain faces a very disputed national election on April 28, where the rural vote will be key.

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'Empty Spain': A Call for Action Against Increasing Ghost Towns

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Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid Sunday to protest under the campaign of "Empty Spain", a national platform that urges the government to take actions against a growing concern of rural depopulation.

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Emptied Spain: nobody's land, everybody's land

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Emptied Spain: nobody's land, everybody's land

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By Alida Juliani

Madrid, Mar 31 (efe-epa).- In the year 1525, when the northeastern Spanish village of Sarnago was the largest exporter of wool to Europe, its inhabitants would have found it hard to believe that one day only cold mountain air would drift through its streets that were once so full of life.

At that time, when more than three million sheep would graze around Sarnago, depopulation was a remote concept and nothing would have predicted the end of a village that lost its last resident in 1976.

He was called Aurelio, and with his death, life in the village took its last breath.

But the village in Soria province has now recovered its pulse thanks to the children of the inhabitants who once had to leave their roots seeking a brighter future in other parts of the country or beyond.

Sarnago is a mirror of a depopulated Soria-currently the province with the lowest demographic index in Spain with a population density of 8 inhabitants per square kilometre-that refuses to disappear.

But it is also a mirror of other rural areas in Spain, which over the past 10 years have lost a quarter of a million inhabitants.

While the country as a whole saw its population double over the course of the 20th century, Castille and León, the region to which Sarnago belongs, grew slowly and has maintained the trend of losing inhabitants since 1960, even after political and economical changes.

"We are talking about an almost deserted area. We are the last stage of the population in this country," president of the Provincial Council of Soria, Luis Rey told EFE.

"We are talking about an ageing population and we are an example of what could happen in other places in this country," he added.

In fact, Castille and León holds the top spot in Europe for the majority of its population being aged over 80, according to Eurostat data given by the Fundacion Renacimiento Demografico (Demographic Renaissance Foundation).

The population crisis in Spain is a consequence of the re-industrialization of the country, which focused on major seaports and the main provincial cities and led to the migration of a large part of the population of rural areas.

The crisis put an end to populations in places like Sarnago, which now has an association of friends and descendants of the first and second generation who are work to recover the village, "because it is something that we owe to our ancestors."

Jose Maria Carrascosa, president of the Sarnago Association of Friends told Efe that it was "very brave" for the first generation to return to the village, considering that if they had not returned in the first few years they never would.

The association was set up 30 years ago and has restored 24 houses with a budget that essentially came from their own personal finances.

"Our budget is tight, but it keeps our hopes alive," said Carrascosa, 53, who believes firmly that to repopulate the area "one has to have another approach," and stop thinking about how people lived in the past.

Internet and new technologies have become a second opportunity for the rural world.

"With the second generation we have a new opportunity to repopulate these areas, although at first it could be as second homes," Carrascosa said, adding that if residents get used to the place they could decide to go and live there for good.

THE FIGHT OF THE NEXT GENERATIONS

Brought together by the platform "Soria Ya!" (Soria Now!), more than 30 young people have picked up the generational baton and dedicate their spare time to fighting for a better distribution of European social funds in order to save their settlement and province from disappearing.

Social media has become a strong ally in the fight that they would on Sunday bring to the Spanish capital Madrid along with members of Teruel Existe (Teruel Exists) and another 73 associations that represent 22 regions at the demonstration under the slogan "Revuelta por la España vaciada" ("Revolt for emptied Spain").

"We felt the need to take on this fight so Soria province does not disappear. We are in a very critical situation," spokesperson of Soria Ya, Fernando Arevalo Jimenez, told Efe.

A lack of opportunities for young people and little or no investment in industry, infrastructure, services and social rights such as healthcare have contributed to the dwindling of the province's population from 164,000 in the 1950s to 89,000 at present.

The spokesperson said Soria wants and has future and funds needed to get to where they were needed.

"We denounce that until now European funds generated through the autonomous communities have not been distributed well, have not reached us here," he said.

DEPOPULATION OF THE CITIES

Depopulation is now not uniquely associated with rural areas but has also become a generalised phenomenon that affects small and medium cities around Spain.

Nearly 63 percent of Spanish cities with a population of between 20,000-50,000-with 39,171 people living in Soria-have seen their populations decrease since 2011, according to a recent report about depopulation in Spain.

"To change this we need political measures and a clear map of needs," said Carlos Martínez, mayor of Soria.

He said it was a "very complex" challenge because depopulation was a consequence of "some absolutely wrong public policies, which have prioritized investment in certain regions, leaving others to luck."

"We are now aware that depopulation is a problem that affects the whole of Spain and the whole of the European Union," he added.

VILLAGERS TAKE TO THE CAPITAL

Sunday's protest in Madrid action brought together some 90 groups from 23 provinces of Spain that are facing depopulation.

The action, originally called by Soria Ya! (Soria Now!) and Teruel Existe (Teruel Exists), kicked off with a minute of silence for areas affected by population decline.

A spokesperson for Soria Ya!, Carlos Vallejo, told Efe he hoped the "sea of people eclipsed" the government ministers and political leaders who took part because "today is not their day."

Two banners fronted the protest reading "The Revolt of Emptied Spain" and "Being few does not subtract rights," in what was intended to show that depopulation on a national scale was a pressing issue that needed investment instead of promises that were never met.

"Words don't count now, we need investment," Vallejo said.

According to Spain's national statistics institute (INE), up to 14 provinces were in a critical state, with around 80 percent of villages of less than 1,000 inhabitants at risk of dying out altogether.

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Emptied Spain: nobody's land, everybody's land

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By Alida Juliani Madrid, Mar 31 (efe-epa).- In the year 1525, when the northeastern Spanish village of Sarnago was the largest exporter of wool to Europe, its inhabitants would have found it hard to believe that one day only cold mountain air would drift through its streets that were once so full of life.

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'Empty Spain’: country grapples with towns fading from the map 

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'Empty Spain’: country grapples with towns fading from the map 

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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.

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.

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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.

Spain depopulation map

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.

"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.

"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?"
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'Empty Spain': country grapples with towns fading from the map

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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.

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Why is Spain's rural world protesting?

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Extra info: Fraguas

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A cuckoo calls in Fraguas, its two-note song echoing through the pines, around the village's ruined church and along the weed-choked rockeries that once were streets.

Until four years ago, there were only hunters and hikers to hear the birds sing. But today, almost five decades after the last inhabitants left, Fraguas is slowly and controversially stirring back to life.

Brick by brick and stone by stone, a collective of young settlers is rebuilding the village in the hills of northern Castilla-La Mancha. The houses that were home to 80 people are being put back together, solar panels have sprung up and a kitchen garden is planted with chard, onions, courgettes and tomatoes.

Their aims are simple: to leave behind the grime and expense of Madrid, 90 minutes' drive away, live sustainably and responsibly, and rekindle an extinguished community.

On a blackboard hanging outside the shared kitchen, visitors and residents are reminded that even bucolic retreats have rules.

Look after your surroundings, clean up your shit and don't leave fag ends on the ground. There's a lot to do, so join one of the work crews.

That may be putting it mildly. Since the village was emptied to make way for a reforestation programme in the late 1960s, Fraguas, in Guadalajara province, has been transformed by nature's persistent creep and, more drastically, a spell as a training area for Spanish soldiers, during which houses were blown up.

The greatest obstacle to its rebirth, however, is neither weeds nor bomb damage.

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Spanish soldiers training in the village in the 1980s. Photograph: Fraguas collective

Despite acknowledging the need to bring young people back to one of Spain's most sparsely populated areas, the regional government has said the collective cannot stay in the village, which lies in public woodland within the Sierra Norte natural park.

Legal proceedings have been initiated and six members of the collective could face fines, more than four years' imprisonment each and a €26,000 (£23,000) bill to demolish what they have built since 2013.

Jaime Merino, 24, one of the settlers, said: "There's a certain resistance to this kind of project in this country.

"They always say they're going to take steps to tackle depopulation and find ways to get people back into rural areas, but this is an example of that. That's the paradox: it's Guadalajara's department of agriculture, the environment and rural development that wants to demolish the village."

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Workers clear away the undergrowth. Six members of the collective could face prison for their activities. Photograph: Fraguas collective

The collective is retaliating with a petition that has attracted more than 60,000 signatures and an appeal for contributions to its legal fund.

Equally important is the support it has received from Fraguas' former inhabitants.

Rafael Heras was born in the village 71 years ago, one of the many babies to arrive after the bloody pause of the civil war. He remembers the village as a simple and self-sufficient place where most people grew crops or had sheep and goats.

"There was no electricity and no proper road; we used to keep it clear so that cars could come through," he said. "It wasn't a prosperous place, but I had a happy childhood here and people got by quite well."

He left Fraguas aged 19 to work in a factory in Madrid, a few years before the villagers were bought out.

"They gave us 3 million pesetas in the 1960s for the village and all the land, which was a pittance. That would be cheap now even if it were €3m," he said.

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One of the communal areas in the newly repopulated village. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian

The Heras family home was the first blown up by the soldiers and, over time, the small cemetery where his mother is buried was swallowed up by weeds. The newcomers have cleared the path leading to the graveyard, cleaned the headstones and rebuilt some of its walls.

"I'm happy to see the village being restored and I'd like to see it come back to life," Heras said. "And I'd like to have a summer home here, but I reckon that won't be possible."

Another former resident, Isidro Moreno, wrote a guide to the village, filled with maps, plans and photos, to help the collective put it back together.

"To the new residents of Fraguas," it begins. "Let's see if you can recover this village's history once more ... I want to remind you to treat these stones with the love and respect they deserve, even if today they're dead and lost among brambles and weeds. In another time, they were alive and were part of the story of the people who struggled so hard to live and who went through so many calamities."

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Rebuilding work in Fraguas. The collective has been trying to revive the village since 2013. Photograph: Fraguas collective

Alberto Rojo, the regional government's representative in Guadalajara province, said while authorities recognise the need to repopulate the Spanish countryside, the law must be upheld. There are, he added, more than 200 living villages in the region that have fewer than 50 inhabitants and which would welcome more people.

"Of course we agree that there needs to be repopulation initiatives in the province - and let's hope there will be many - but only in the right kind of places," he said.

The area, Rojo added, is a natural park, protected by law, where there is a risk of forest fires.

Merino dismissed such arguments as absurd and said the collective has reduced the risk of fires by cleaning up rubbish and dead wood, and refilling a disused water cistern. He said it has offered to dig firebreaks around the village free of charge.

Merino and his friends are hoping the case will be dropped before it reaches court. If not, they are relying on public support and the testimony of Heras and other former residents.

Buoyed as they are by the petition and financial support, they remain puzzled by the notion of being made to pay for the destruction of the hamlet they have worked so hard to rebuild.

"Maybe we'll become the first village in Spanish history to be demolished three times," said Merino. "That wouldn't surprise me in this country."
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Fraguas: the revitalised Spanish village officials now plan to demolish

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A cuckoo calls in Fraguas, its two-note song echoing through the pines, around the village's ruined church and along the weed-choked rockeries that once were streets. Until four years ago, there were only hunters and hikers to hear the birds sing.

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Extra info: Fraguas (II)

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Six members of a collective that resettled an abandoned Spanish village are facing prison after being found guilty of illegal occupation.

The tiny village of Fraguas, which sits in the hills of northern Castilla-La Mancha, was emptied in the late 1960s as part of a reforestation programme and was later used as a training area for the Spanish army.

A group of young settlers arrived in 2013 and began bringing the village back to life with the blessing of its former inhabitants. Over the past five years, they have rebuilt houses, planted vegetables and worked to restore the overgrown village cemetery.
Fraguas: the revitalised Spanish village officials now plan to demolish
Their activities have been opposed by the regional government, which points out that Fraguas lies in public woodland within the Sierra Norte natural park and argues that their presence is a fire hazard.

Castilla-La Mancha's high court ruled on Friday that the collective had unlawfully occupied the site and sentenced six of its members to 18 months' imprisonment. They were also fined €2,700 (£2,370) each and ordered to reimburse the regional government for the cost of demolishing the newly restored areas of Fraguas.

Although the sentences could be served on probation as they are under the two-year threshold, the court said failure to pay the fines would result in a three-year sentence.

Fraguas map

Jaime Merino, a spokesman for the collective, described the sentences as devastating and said an appeal would be launched.

"We had thought we might be acquitted. We thought the trial had gone well," he said. "There were lots of other ways [the regional government] could have done this. They didn't have to take it to court. There could have been negotiations instead, but they went down the criminal route, which is the toughest one available."

Despite the intervention of local environmentalists, who have been acting as negotiators - and a petition with more than 77,000 signatures in support of the project - the collective now believes prison is inevitable.

Merino said the six did not have the money to pay the fines. "Anyway, it's not just the fines we have to pay, it's the cost of the demolition, which will be decided by the regional government," he said. "If we don't have the money for the fines and the demolition, they'll translate the fines into prison time, which will increase the sentence and we'll end up in jail.

"We're pretty freaked out but we haven't lost hope. We haven't decided to chuck it all in and head back to the city again. No way. We're going to fight this all the way to the end. We're convinced that we're doing something good, not just for us but also for the former inhabitants, who've been supporting us."

The satirical Spanish magazine El Jueves tweeted its support for the collective. "These squatters shouldn't be sentenced, they should be given an award. Pardon them and put them in charge of a rural repopulation ministry - now.," it wrote.
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Six face jail after illegal occupation of Spanish village of Fraguas

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Six members of a collective that resettled an abandoned Spanish village are facing prison after being found guilty of illegal occupation. The tiny village of Fraguas, which sits in the hills of northern Castilla-La Mancha, was emptied in the late 1960s as part of a reforestation programme and was later used as a training area for the Spanish army.