Towns with employment, but without inhabitants

The Fonolleres industrial estate It’s everyone’s dream rural mayor. almost one thirty companies are concentrated in a mass of warehouses at the foot of the Autovía del Nordeste (A2), visible from the old castles that crown the tiny towns in this corner of the Segarra region of Lleida. The polygon employs more than 300 workers. They manufacture parts for electric cars, fuel tanks, low-consumption light bulbs or garbage containers. Artifacts of a modernity that has tiptoed through these tame terraced valleys that served as the border between the Christian and Muslim worlds a millennium ago. That industrial estate should now serve as magnet for repopulation that cry out for five towns of the municipality, if not because the problem is somewhat more complicated.

Ramón Cos lives with his octogenarian mother in The black berry. Are the only two permanent inhabitants of the cluster of stone houses that make up the town, where there was no running water until the 1970s. Through its silent streets, where only the movement of the wind is heard, the blurred trace of better times. Here’s an old sign from the telephone office; there is an engraving on the lintel of a house from 1892. “I am very sorry that the town has emptied out & rdquor ;, says Cos in front of the pond where he collects water for his cereal fields, adorning his words with a Catalan sprinkled with medieval turns . “When I was a child, all the houses were full. They worked in agriculture and families had to take turns baking bread in the oven, but they lived in harmony.”

La Mora is one of the five towns of the unpronounceable municipality of Granyanella, located halfway between Tarrega Y cervera. Among all of them, they only have 145 registered inhabitants, four times less than at the beginning of the 20th century. It was half a century later when the exodus began to take shape, propelled by the mechanization of agriculture and the bet on cereal monoculture, which hardly requires labor. Today none of these towns has optical fiber or natural gas. Neither outpatient bakery or even a Pub. For not having, they have no cure. The one from La Mora only comes at the festival or when one of the locals returns to town to raise larvae in the same land where it was born.

Homelessness

“Is very hard to lift this& rdquor ;, admits the mayor, Jordi Porti, in front of the old desks recovered from the three schools that the municipality came to have, all of them closed decades ago. Today they are exhibited in the City Hall to honor the history of these peoples who resist dying. “One of the main problems we have in attracting people is the Homelessness. We have plenty of empty houses, but their owners do not want to sell or rent them. They keep them for what may happen and they prefer to have them closed to expose themselves to a problematic rent & rdquor ;, says the mayor of Junts, who has been in office for less than a year.

The housing shortage is a widespread problem in depopulated Catalonia. The urban laws they were not made with their towns in mind, but rather with the large urban and coastal areas. “A town in rural Catalonia has the same urban restrictions that Salou or Lloret de Mar. Can you imagine it? Is a huge slab for our development”, says Jaume Gilabert, the coordinator of Eines de Repoblament Rural, the mayors’ lobby to which Granyanella also belongs. Some restrictions were lifted in the law accompanying the latest budgets of the Generalitat, but there is still work to be done.

Recharges on the IBI for empty houses

“It would be great for us to have houses for the workers of the polygon. But we have no offer or land to build. We should reclassify soils and that has to go through the Lleida Provincial Council first & rdquor ;, explains Portí. One of the options considered by the mayors is to impose surcharges on the Real Estate Tax (IBI) to the owners of empty houses. But in towns like Granyanella it is questionable whether they can be effective. For a four-bedroom house in the town you pay 22 euros per year of IBI. So even if a 100% top-up were imposed, the sum would still be negligible.

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The mayor does not want to give up. Its City Council weighs as an alternative the buy old houses to rehabilitate them and put them up for rent, as others are doing microvillages. But you need money, a rare commodity in smaller municipalities. Granyanella’s budget goes on things like fixing recurring leaks from your pipes, which are more than half a century old, or put benches in the cemetery. Portí is also considering requesting European funds to install a photovoltaic plant, which would help with lighting and would serve to generate new incentives for companies.

But even so, an important stumbling block would remain to be resolved: the complete absence of services. “The youths they seek comfort. They want to have the supermarket and the bank close to home and we don’t have any of that here. You have to take the car for everything. Hence, young people prefer to live in Tárrega, Cervera or Igualada & rdquor ;, says the mayor. His recurring nightmare is that one day there will be no lights on in these towns or cars parked on their sidewalks. “We don’t want dead towns or ghost towns. Something has to be done and it has to be done now.”