depopulation Archives

Galician depopulation is filling the cemeteries with anonymous tombstones. There are those who want to solve it with QR codes

July 8, 2026 by usatoday24

It is one of the most unknown parishes in Pontevedra, a small town that has been shedding its inhabitants until it is left with barely 700. We are talking about Cerpozones (Cerponzóns), near the town of Alba or Tilve, the northern corner where they have wanted to take a curious step to preserve their own history: place QR codes (quicktime response) on cemetery tombstones. You scan a tombstone in Galicia and a life appears. “Linguistic restitution act“The O Chedeiro Neighborhood Association has been responsible for reformulating the usual text that can be found on the tombstones of the San Vicenzo cemetery. Why? Because they want the most distant generations, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, to be able to discover what story there is behind the names engraved in the marble. Read the past to understand the present. The first QR premiered in the family pantheon of Juan José Esperón-Recareyneighbor, writer and secretary of the association. The scan opens a direct link to the blog ‘O Roque de Cerponzóns’, where the life of this family crossed by emigration, agricultural work, sociability in taverns and the daily history of the parish is documented. In this blog you can discover the life, for example, of Jesús Recarey Lorenzo, tram conductor and conductor who dedicated a life to daily mobility, or Carmen Recarey Cochón, owner of the Rums tavernthe social center of the parish. Cerponzóns has also recently been the headline of several news stories for the documentary ‘A cardboard suitcase‘, as part of an initiative to preserve the memory and discover the history of this parish. The family has already changed the inscriptions on the tombstones from Spanish to Galician and this time they wanted to do something special, inspired by the Association of Officials for Linguistic Normalization of Galicia, which proposes using QRs with information in Galician about the deceased to remember names and experiences. Much better than a DEP When the grave is an interface As ironic as it may seem, this Pontevedra movement rhymes with many other actions carried out on the other side of the world. In Japan, the funeral company Ishi no Koe (literally “The voice of the stones”) has developed marble tombstones with embedded QRs that give access to websites with photos, videos, family testimonies and records of who visits the tomb and how many times said code has been scanned. These high-tech tombstones They are around $10,000. And the same with automated columbariums in china: In cities such as Shanghai, Shenyang or Fujian, cemeteries have been offering QR stickers on tombstones for years that, when scanned, show obituaries, photos, videos and music of the deceased, in the context of Grave Sweeping Day (Qingming) and a growing culture of “virtual mourning rooms“Well, and the candles are so automated that they light themselves at night. In Europe we can also find similar examples of this adaptation to the times. Denmark was one of the pioneers: In 2012, a tombstone company began offering porcelain plaques with QR codes for access to biographies within Roskilde Cemetery. The service cost about 100 euros and was sold as a way to preserve local stories and make the visit to the cemetery more interesting. I remember, in fact, on a visit to Berlin that its three Jewish cemeteries already had similar systems for being able to follow the sentences as if it were karaokeand even some masons were changing or repairing the codes for more robust plates. Although it is easy to consider it an experiment to understand digital grief. In the United Kingdom there are dozens of companies like Digital Gravestones or StoneCode Lite that sell packages of digital memorials. These include a website with photos, biography, timeline, cemetery location on Google Maps, condolence book and QR plate or weather-resistant NFC tag, with classic, minimalist or modern models and hosting from one to five years. There it is nothing. The truth is that an easy-to-read epitaph has an imprint that cannot replace a QR code. However, creatives such as historian Frederick Meza, designer of Memorial QR, consider that this is a more useful and practical form of documentation, archiving, and also to promote necrotourism and historical pedagogy of relevant figures: dignitaries, former mayors, artists and party founders, etc. Too much data for a place of mourning? Songs, poems and digital condolence books, this model also opens a debate: what about privacy? That anyone can scan and access that information may bother certain family members who prefer to preserve and reserve their past. However, the digitization of cemeteries has been unstoppable after the pandemic. In Spain, the cemeteries, with their cypress trees and flower crowns, are extremely quiet places where a certain decibel threshold is rarely violated. It is clear that QR codes are not just a gadget, but a way to expand the tomb from the name-date to the complete story, something very useful for anchoring biographies to local contexts, minority languages or family genealogies that were previously lost in scattered papers. The parish of Cerponzóns has managed to manage its story through its blog, but the friction is still there: who decides what is told and who reads it? Or, more specifically: what happens when a public cemetery becomes an archive accessible to anyone curious, is it safe? It remains to be known how passwords are managed and what will become of technical continuity to verify whether great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren will truly know about their ancestors without entering broken links 50 years from now. Images | Unsplash (Brett Jordan, Waldemar Brandt), Tourism of the Council of Redondela In Xataka | Spain has more pets than children, so Malaga has inaugurated something inevitable: the first cemetery for dogs In Xataka | Burying a loved one is expensive. Some cemeteries are already beginning to offer an alternative: fertilizer for plants

The problem of depopulation and the incredible demographic polarization of Europe, on a bleak map

May 17, 2026 by usatoday24

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 In Xataka | There is a very simple reason why it has taken Spain so long to have fiber optics in rural areas: this map In Xataka | Empty Europe: this is how the population has moved from the countryside to the city in just ten years Cover | Correctiv

The emptied Spain seemed condemned to depopulation. Until a town in Palencia found a way to avoid it

February 22, 2026 by usatoday24

until recently Nava walls (Palencia) was a remote town known above all for its heritage and being the birthplace of the poet Jorge Manrique and the painters Peter and Alonso Berruguete. That was until not long ago, we say. In recent days the name of this town in Tierra de Campos has grabbed headlines throughout the country for another reason: against all odds, it has become proof that the ‘Spain emptied’ and the rural peninsula do not have to resign themselves to losing population. In Paredes they have certainly worked a miracle. The most curious thing is that he has done it with a recipe quite obvious. Looking at the INE. Although its tables are basically made up of figures, percentages and rates, from time to time the INE gives us the odd mystery. It happens in Paredes de Nava, Palencia. If we take a look at their census we observe a curious phenomenon: despite the fact that their region (Land of Fields) has spent the last decades losing density of population, in line with much of rural Spain, in recent years Paredes has gained neighbors. In 2023 they were registered in the town 1,985 peoplejust one year later there were 1,911 and in 2025 the observatory already counted 1,927. Is it that curious? Yes. It may not be spectacular growth, but it is striking if two factors are taken into account. First, it breaks the negative trend that Paredes had experienced in recent times, accustomed to losing a few 25 residents every year. Second, the town had not moved in its current population data for quite some time. We have to go back to 2018 to find a better result and the town hopes to reach the psychological barrier of the 2,000 registereda figure that has not been used since 2013. And how is it possible? If the case of Paredes has attracted attention beyond Palencia or Castilla y León, it is because this increase in population is neither coincidental nor the result of chance. On the contrary. Responds to a strategy that already has sparked interest from other towns and relies on two legs: immigration and affordable housing. To understand it, we have to go back to 2024, when the mayor of the town, Luis Calderón, contacted YourTechoa Spanish SOCIMI that seeks solutions to “homelessness and lack of housing.” The entity works in several fields at the same time, but in the rural Their bet basically consists of recovering empty houses to turn them into “accessible” homes for “vulnerable families.” Objective: home… and roots. In practice, this means that they acquire homes and then rent them to the City Council so that they end up being rented to new residents in an initiative with a marked social focus. On walls for example 75% of the beneficiaries are foreigners, especially Latinos. Since the idea is for newcomers to the town to take root, it is easier for them to take root. different shapes. As? Through contracts of leasing for those who need a vehicle or rentals with option to own. And the work? The councilor assures There are no shortage of vacancies in the province. In addition to the Renault factory, livestock and agriculture there are a project to open an olive oil refining factory. “There are plenty of jobs, there are more than 1,200 unfilled, that is without taking into account the social and health needs and those of Renault,” guarantees Calderón, who optimistically awaits the opening of the new oil refining factory: “We are going to need many more houses.” “The solution, in rural areas”. The demographic pulse of the town is not new. It started after the pandemic, when a special office focused on repopulation opened. Years ago he decided to welcome 200 Ukrainian mothers and their children, in 2024 he contacted TuTecho and today he boasts that the town has managed to attract 150 new inhabitants. Of them, a third (49) have arrived thanks to TuTecho, which has in turn acquired 11 homes in the Palencia municipality. Initially the company had acquired only four. “The solution to the country’s main problems, housing and immigration, is in rural areas,” he defended. a few days ago the councilor in statements collected by The Newspaper. The truth is that Paredes’ experience seems to have encouraged other people. Those responsible for TuTecho explain that they have already made the leap to a dozen towns, where they also collaborate with city councils to articulate a residential rental offer that makes possible what for a long time seemed like a pipe dream in emptied Spain: “Restock”. “A bridge between both”. The founder of Tutecho, Blanca Hernández, sums it up clearly: “Depopulation is a challenge, homelessness another. We realized that we can be a bridge between the two,” relates to The Confidential. “It’s about matching the profiles of inhabitants that the town needs with the families that meet those requirements and need a home.” In the case of Paredes, they have even managed to ensure that the school, which until not so long ago seemed on a tightrope, faces the future with some peace of mind. Not bad if you take into account that, as stated in a recent EY report, 48% of the territory Spanish does not reach the European density threshold (12.5 inhabitants per km2) and 80% of small rural municipalities are losing population. Images | Santiago López-Pastor (Flickr) and Wikipedia In Xataka | Empty Spain is now officially one of the quietest places on the planet. There is no risk that it will cease to be

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