A silent, empty world.
The only movement the slow indolent flaps of a red kite, it’s twisting forktail catching the low morning light, a chiaroscuro of russet and shade. A lazy economical progression across the bleached stubble, quartering the ground, searching for carrion, yet covering a vast area in mere moments. It’s the only visible living entity in this wide open viewscape.
The villages are similarly silent, their pale limestone walls dissolving into the weathered winter soil, the houses’ eyes blinded: the roller shutters dropped. Others sag underneath the accumulated weight of decades, forlorn defenceless buildings just before the roof falls in. Bramble and nettle clamber out through glaze-less frames escaping the deluge and the dereliction. Some carry aged ‘Se Vende’ boards, time-worn and weather-beaten such that you have to wonder if the ‘phone number for a sale is even current.
A field crop of sunflowers: ‘girasols’ the sun watchers, now stand withered, their heads hung low like a devout penitential congregation. All face west, just like the chapels. Forfeiting the will to live, they await the finality of the scythe, or at least the combine harvester.
We’re riding through farming country, draped in a winter patina of muted colours, vaguely spooked by the silent, wide open emptiness. Watching, observing, noticing and can’t help pondering an interesting incongruity. The small fenceless pocket fields versus the engrossed tractors and their commensurate tackle. Never fieldworking, they’re either parked up in yards or negotiating the tight confines of a meandering village street. Some might suggest that this is a neat summation of the vagaries of EU mandates and the capriciousness of a Common Agricultural Policy. I, however as a Brexit’d third country person, can’t comment.
Walking into another hilltop village and another incongruity. A stasis, a timeless scene lost in the silent expanse of white light in the plaza, the echoing scrunch of our steps snagged by the walls of centuries-ancient houses. It could be a view from one of many ages, one that is shattered by a glossy black SUV pushing itself past us.
Silent, empty, ancient, perhaps, but look a little closer and life seeps in. For one, that bloated charabanc had to be going somewhere in the immediate locality. For another the library window carries the information that the Post Office will operate here between midday and ten past, the doctor will consult for two hours tomorrow, and the geraniums in the town hall’s widow boxes are still flowering. Somebody must water them. The gutters have been recently hoed of their accumulated weeds; I can still see the bristle strokes and shovel patterns.
Behind those aged eyeless facades in some of these places there must be life, the evidence is there. In many others it’s not so.
‘España vacia’: empty Spain is a simple fact and a political conundrum. The flight from rural to urban, soil to city, only accelerates, such that now 90% of the population live in town. The falling birth rate exacerbates the demographics of an aging population whilst estate agents offer whole villages for sale and the visitor can purchase a voyeuristic ghost-villages sightseeing tour.
In adversity there will always be someone’s opportunity.
Eventually a confirmation of living village life does materialise: the hesitant notes of a music lesson drifting from the almost shuttered window.
