Come Home To… Your Own Village

Feel as if your vast apartment or even more spacious mansion is cramping your style? Then, suggests Gary Jones, why not upsize to something even more expansive?

- Gary Jones

Declining populations in some of southern Europe’s most appealing destinations mean it’s now relatively routine to read of sun-bleached stone cottages in idyllic Italian hilltop communes and rustic, fixer-upper farmhouses in medieval Spanish mountain towns coming on to market for significantly less than the price of a few square feet of Singapore real estate – and occasionally for small change that wouldn’t even buy an espresso.

In Spain, the phenomenon has been dubbed la España vacía, or “empty Spain”, with the number of abandoned villages estimated to be ticking up by one every week. More than 3,000 once-thriving communities in rural Galicia, in the north of the country, have been abandoned, decimated by a low birth rate and fast-ageing society, as well as a lack of opportunities that’s seen younger folk migrate to cities and other EU countries looking for work.

And things are just as troubling across the Mediterranean, in rural Italy, which is also suffering a demographic time bomb. In 2019, for the first time in close to a century, Italy’s population fell to about 55 million, according to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, plummeting by an astonishing 677,000 in the previous four years.