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Thursday, January 15, 2015

A Spanish Exodus to the Cities leaves a Desert in its Wake‏



1) Ferfal, the UK's Financial Times has an interesting article titled "A Spanish exodus to the cities leaves a desert in its wake".
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/09fde45a-8053-11e4-9907-00144feabdc0.html#slide0

2) Some excerpts from the article: [All around Motos, in Spanish inland provinces such as Teruel, Guadalajara and Soria, villages are gradually being abandoned. A process of depopulation and rural flight that has lasted more than five decades is drawing to its seemingly inevitable conclusion.
What is left behind is a region twice the size of Belgium but so devoid of people that it rivals the Arctic provinces of Lapland as the least populated zone in Europe. For every square kilometre, there are fewer than eight inhabitants.] ["Checa is at the limit,” says Mr Alba. “Right now we still have a medical centre. We have a bank. We have a restaurant and a couple of bars. But if we lose more inhabitants we won’t be able to hold on to those services.”
Keeping the local school is crucial, says Juan Vicente Aparicio, the mayor of nearby
Orihuela del Tremedal. “The moment when there are not enough children to keep the school going, that is when you know that the village is finished. People don’t move to places where there is no school,” he says. ]
[Mr Alba admits that there is no easy solution to halt the slide. He travels to Madrid frequently to raise the plight of his region with senior politicians. More investment and better incentives for businesses to relocate would help, he says. ]
Don Williams
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Rural flight is very common. Given Spain’s economic crisis, its no wonder that you see what you typically see during an economic crisis, which is people leaving small, hard hit towns and moving to bigger cities where there’s more job opportunities.
I know, its ironic because many in the prepper community seem to think that it will work the other way around. Still, doing a bit of research quickly shows that the opposite is what happens the most in these cases.
Let reality and previous events guide your preparedness plans folks, not some survival fiction novel!
Thanks for the article.

FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.

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