It is still night time, but the cock has already crowed. The man has been hearing it all his life –not the same one, but generation after generation of cocks that have been living in the henhouse since he was born- and now, he cannot bear it any more: each day the cock crows means a day that he is still alive. “One of these days I will wring his neck”, he thinks, but he knows that even if he did, the sun would still rise every day, and to be honest, the village is already too silent to do away with the last remaining sign of life. It is difficult for him to accept that the last few villagers have died, and all that remains of the place where they used to spend the afternoon in silence, but together, is the box, the bench and the broken chair.
The sad thing about this story is that it is true, and even sadder is the fact that this story repeats itself in many villages, infected by the virus of rural exodus, that chronic disease to which no governments pay attention, they just wait for the day when this problem will magically disappear. But our rural world is so fragile that there aren’t any witches left to cast spells to solve the problem, in fact, if Aragón (a region in North Spain) is leader in anything, it is in the number of abandoned villages. There is no official data to number them, but it is known that there are more than 200.
If the authorities don’t remedy this immediately, that number will soon double, and for every village lost, we will lose a part of our culture and a piece of our history, in spite of all the work that has been put into building a future, generation after generation. We do not realise the role played by rural areas in maintaining the landscape and biodiversity. I remember a farmer telling me “Yes, I am a farmer, but moreover I am a landscape gardener, and the landscape belongs to all”. Soon there won’t be any more of these gardeners, and our landscapes will lose the appearance they have today. Shrubs and scrubs will take over, and many plant and animal species will disappear. We will no longer have landscapes to admire. The role played by women and men living in rural areas must be recognized, the heroes and heroines that keep certain values alive, values that have been lost in the cities a long time ago.
Village life offers many opportunities, not always linked to the land. However the Administrations must provide equal opportunities for the inhabitants of the marginalised rural areas and above all, their voice should be heard when developing initiatives to revitalise rural communities. In the cities it is often forgotten that without a rural world, there wouldn’t be an urban world.
Author:
Lucía López Marco (IAMZ-CIHEAM)
Article originally published in Arainfo on 24th October 2015