Elena Llauradó, mayor of La Granadella (Garrigues, Lleida), is inundated with requests from neighbors: a room for a social activity; an orchestra for the end of year party and a bus for a cultural visit to Lleida for the school students. . “The children of Lleida go to a museum on foot, but the Department of Education does not understand that the students here are always going to need a bus to get around,” complains Llauradó, with the feeling that the offices in the capital are not always sensitive to rural reality.
The mayor is confident that the new Statute of Rural Municipalities that the Parliament hopes to approve starting in 2025 responds to the needs and needs. “We need more resources and less bureaucracy,” he summarizes. Now the town is waiting to complete the upper floor of a house that was left half-finished and for which the mayor aspires to receive a subsidy. “Just doing the project to present it to the administration will cost us 15,000 euros and it is not included in the subsidies. “This is a lot of money for us.”
In Riner (Solsonès, Lleida), with 264 inhabitants, the municipal team has an administrator who works full time, a secretary who also acts as an auditor three days a week; and a technician who goes to the municipality once a week. “Do you think that with this structure we can handle much larger teams than ours?” asks Joan Solà, mayor of the municipality and president of the Associació de Micropobles de Catalunya. “We never come out with equal opportunities and many micro-towns rule out requesting aid because they do not have the resources to do so. Large municipalities have entire teams that are dedicated exclusively to carrying out the same procedures as us but with many more hands,” he understands.
Of the total of 947 municipalities in Catalonia, 593 (63%) have a population of less than 2,000 inhabitants, and, according to the data collected in the bill, processed a month ago in Parliament with the support of the main municipal entities . “The municipal public administration system represents a very heavy burden [para los municipios rurales] given that they do not have the means to be able to comply with all the requirements and procedures required by law,” justifies the new regulatory document. “It is about putting the citizens who live in these municipalities at the center of this norm, with the same rights as the rest of the citizens.”
The objective, the mayors understand, is that every time a new regulation is applied it takes into account the diversity of the rural area. “It is fundamental,” remarks Llauradó, who gives as an example the limitations of urban plans in urban and rural areas. “The height of the houses is limited equally: what do we do with the farmer who needs to store two tractors at the bottom?” he questions.
But the mayors warn that the final objective is to reverse depopulation. According to a 2022 calculation by the Institute of Statistics of Catalonia (Idescat), half of the micro-towns with less than 500 inhabitants will have lost population by 2041. The new Statute also proposes tax deductions of up to 1,000 euros for people who move to these municipalities.
Few areas have undergone a transformation as striking as Cerdanya (Girona). Anna runs a small rural house in Urtx, a few kilometers from Puigcerdà, and welcomes tourists in the winter season. “The majority are people from Barcelona who come to ski,” he says. When he has guests he comes from Puigcerdà, where he lives, and prepares breakfast. This weekend expects two families.
They barely spend a weekend in the area, but Anna cuts things off. “People believe that living in a town is a privilege, but it is hard. “Not everyone can handle it,” he says. And he points out the high housing prices: “Many people who came to work during the ski season have to quit because they cannot access an apartment and go to Lleida, where the square meter is cheaper,” he points out. According to data published on the Habitaclia website, the price of non-single-family homes in Puigcerdà has increased by 28% in the last year in the busiest areas.
In Sant Miquel de Campmajor (Pla de l’Estany, Girona), a municipality of 250 inhabitants, the town council has acquired an uninhabited property where the town’s former bakers lived. The ground floor is the old commercial premises and the upper floor is the home. ”says Oriol Serrà, the councillor. The owners gave up maintaining the business and no one wanted to take on the purchase of the entire property. Now the City Council intends to obtain resources to “rehabilitate the building,” explains Serrà, rent the home and open the ground floor to competition, energize a business that boosts the economic and social life of the municipality.
The lack of services and businesses is the evolution of an economic model that found an opportunity in tourism, but which according to Serrà, has ended up damaging the territorial model itself. “Towns were places to live and rural tourism was a complement to farming,” he says. “But with him boom from housing for tourist use aimed at the people of the city came companies and speculation; The price skyrocketed and the tenants had to leave. “They colonized us and treated us like a theme park, like the backyard of the big city.”
