Spain is often talked about as a country under pressure — overcrowded cities, tourism, rising prices, and overheated housing markets.
But there’s another Spain moving quietly in the opposite direction.
In this film, I travel through some of Spain’s most depopulated regions to understand what happens when villages are left behind — and whether abandonment is really the end of the story.
From reservoirs that submerged entire communities, to remote mountain villages where the last residents only left in recent years, this journey took me from Extremadura to Aragón and Castilla y León. What I expected to be a story about economics and infrastructure turned into something far more human.
In Sarnago, a village without permanent residents since the late 1970s, I found a community that never stopped coming back — working together, sharing meals, preserving traditions, and quietly refusing to let the place be forgotten.
This film isn’t about nostalgia, and it isn’t about easy solutions. It’s about memory, community, and a Spanish concept that has no direct English translation, but may hold an important lesson for all of us.
Credit to : Spain Unfiltered