Europe is experiencing a silent paradox: its total population is growing in recent decades and yet, half of its towns and cities today have fewer inhabitants than in the 1960s. Special mention deserves cities like Madrid, Athens or Lisbon, truly out of control in front of the wastelands that are right next door. It is the consequence of decades of rural exodus, falling birth rates and migratory flows. Beyond colors and figures, this has a direct consequence in those municipalities that are dying: schools that close, doctors without substitutes and trains that no longer stop at stations.
The map shows the population change municipality to municipality in Europe between 1961 and 2024. Green indicates growth and red indicates loss of inhabitants. Be careful because there are places where the growth is 500% and others where the drop reaches 80%. It covers around 100,000 municipalities in 32 countries: all EU states plus the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. This magnificent map is the work of Correctiv with data from the Eurostat Joint Research Center (JRC) based on a 63-year municipal historical series with homogeneous borders.
How has he achieved it? The JRC has used satellite images of residential building volume as an indicator of where people lived in each era, and cross-referenced that information with harmonized Eurostat censuses. We recommend visiting the website of Correctiv for an in-depth view of its infographic with animations, where it also allows you to filter by two periods: from 61 to 91 and from 91 to 2024 and more or less around that time there is a historical milestone that marks the future of the East: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the 32 countries analyzed, one in five rural municipalities has lost more than half of its population in these 60 years. Is the consequence of the urbanization of the 20th century: industry concentrated employment in the cities and the service economies that came later gave the finishing touch. Rural areas, on the other hand, live in a vicious circle: the more services are closed, the more depopulation, and so on. We are talking about bank branches, bakeries, consultations… The demographer Claudia Neu warns that the aging of European societies is the greatest challenge and that health and care costs will fall on this young generation, let us remember is increasingly scarce.
The Europe of Schrödinger: grows and empties at the same time
Population change in Europe: 1961 – 2024. Correctiv
Europe is the oldest continent on the planet: has a birth rate average below 1.5 children per woman, looking from afar at that 2.1 that stipulates the replacement level. In Italy and Spain it is 1.3. The budding demographic pyramid in a system designed to function under constant growth, that is, the pressure of health, care and pensions falls on a base that narrows each year. In fact, the Center for European Reform He already says it loud and clear: only immigration can save us.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of European borders triggered a large migratory flow from the former Soviet bloc to the west. 88% of municipalities in eastern Germany have lost population since 1991, compared to only 26% in the west. Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and Latvia lead a unique decline in European history without wars involved. In fact, Bulgaria takes the cake: the Vidin region has lost 61% of its population. In Lithuania there is a contradiction: while 73% of its municipalities have shrunk, the capital has tripled. But what am I going to tell you if you live in Spain.
Spain is the maximum expression of this trend. Correctiv
Because Spain embodies the paradox of the map like no one else: Eight of the ten fastest growing municipalities in all of Europe are municipalities on the outskirts of Madrid. Meanwhile, Villarroya in Rioja has lost 98% of its inhabitants since 1961. Spain emptied. Be careful, Spain is not emptied as a whole, but it is polarized: it grows on the coasts and the big cities and bleeds into the interior.
The immediate future does not invite optimism: the INE projects that the Spanish state will always have more deaths than births during the next fifteen years and that the percentage of people over 65 years of age, which today is 20.4%, will exceed 30% by 2055. The only safety valve to sustain the numbers is immigration: net inflows are projected to be around 375,000 people per year until mid-century, that is, by 2050 4 out of every 10 residents of the Spanish state will be born outside
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Cover | Correctiv
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