Dying Spanish villages grappling with an exodus of young people have been revived by an influx of Britons seeking a new life under the sun.
Partaloa and Bédar, two municipalities in Almeria, southern Spain, have seen their populations double in almost the past 25 years after a wave of people moving there from the UK.
Many of the arrivals are retirees but despite Brexit making it harder to get visas in Spain, younger Britons have also continued to make new lives in these villages.
Stephen Conroy, who is from Liverpool but has lived in Spain for 11 years, is councillor for tourism in Partaloa, where he is responsible for liaising with foreigners living in the village. “I would agree that more Britons and other nationalities have come in and changed the village. We have brought more taxes and it has led to better roads being built,” he told i.
Mr Conroy, 69, a retired English teacher, said that despite visa restrictions imposed since Brexit, Britons are still coming to live in Partaloa. “Now the visa restrictions mean you need more money. You cannot come and live on a UK pension,” he said.
There are now three types of visa in Spain – the digital nomad visa, entrepreneurs visa and non-lucrative visa, under which UK citizens must show they have savings and pay for private health insurance. Before Brexit, UK citizens could be treated for free and did not need to demonstrate they had savings.
Under post-Brexit rules, British pensioners must have €16,000 (£13,600) per year to qualify for a non-lucrative visa, and state pensions do not always meet this threshold. Mr Conroy, who lives off his UK pension, does not have to comply with these rules because he moved before the UK left Europe and is a resident in Spain.
“House prices are going up,” Mr Conroy added. “There are a couple of houses here for €500,000. In the past you did not see houses as expensive as that here.”
In Partaloa, about 600 residents are foreigners, British people being the biggest group, while the remaining 300 are Spaniards, according to data from last year from the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). This is double the population compared with 2000.
Bédar, with a population of 1,012, has also experienced a huge influx of foreigners, with about 500 residents hailing from Britain or other northern European countries, INE figures for 2023 showed.
María Joaquina López, mayor of Partaloa, said Britons were the largest population of foreigners but Dutch and Belgians were also moving to the village. “Without the British and also other foreigners, this village would be half what it is today. It was dying out as more younger people are leaving and going to the cities,” she told i.
Rural depopulation is an endemic problem in Spain as younger people leave to find jobs in cities. In Andalusia, which includes the province of Almeria, at least 400 villages are suffering from rural depopulation – or 54 per cent of all small municipalities.
Spain has created a special government ministry to deal with what it calls the “demographic challenge” as three out of four villages have suffered a population decline in the past decade.
Mr Conroy said his village still needed more children to ensure its future. “About 40 per cent of the children in the local school are British and foreigners,” he added.