A House to Stay

Many doors, few keys

When the villages emptied, in the 1960s, almost nobody sold their house. It remained as «the village house»: it opens in summer, during local festivities and the occasional long weekend, and the rest of the year it remains closed. Half a century later, that produces a consequence repeated by almost everyone living in the area: there are houses, but there is no housing.

In 2024, the INTEGRADAPTA study, which interviewed local residents, mayors, and technical staff of the Alto Tajo Natural Park, called it a paradox: villages full of empty houses that cannot be accessed, sometimes not even by local residents themselves. Most are second homes that owners use a few weeks a year and do not want to rent or sell. The few that go up for sale, according to many interviewees, ask for more than they are worth. And almost nothing is built, even less so public housing.

The numbers confirm it from another angle. Construction provided in 2021 nearly half the jobs in the Park’s municipalities, 47%, and most were renovations of those very same village houses.

Ten villages, 669 registered residents

In September 2022, the Alto Tajo intermunicipal association, which brings together Arbeteta, Armallones, El Recuenco, Peñalén, Peralveche, Poveda de la Sierra, Villanueva de Alcorón and Zaorejas, with Huertapelayo and Villar de Cobeta, approved an Urban Agenda with a village-by-village diagnosis. Together they totaled 669 registered residents, under one inhabitant per square kilometre, and only half lived there all year.

Each village had its own housing problem:

• In Zaorejas, out of 125 registered residents, around 60 lived there regularly, and none was under forty years old. There was rental housing available, but businesses—the campsite and the fish farm—had closed.
• In Poveda de la Sierra, the kaolin mine provided employment and good wages, but there were no rental houses for outside workers, who had to stay in other villages. Furthermore, the village, hemmed in between streams, could not grow.
• In Armallones there were several empty municipal houses that could be put to use.
• Villanueva de Alcorón, the main hub, was one of the few with public rental housing, and rentals were one of its five sources of income.
• In El Recuenco, with 60 registered residents, the old Civil Guard barracks, a 771-square-metre building on a plot of over 1,100, was seen as the big opportunity.
• In Arbeteta, with 26 registered residents, bread arrived once a week, there were two plots left to build on, and the Agenda itself proposed attracting a couple of families.

What has been tried

Some town halls have renovated municipal-owned properties with European funds, such as the priest’s house or the pharmacy, to rent them out. In El Recuenco, the mayor, Enrique Collada, noted that the renovation of the former teachers’ quarters for affordable rental had brought six children to the village. In Alustante, the family of Elena Ivanciu, arriving from Romania, was able to settle because a neighbor, Angelita, rented them a house; the magazine Hontanar reports that in the village it is the residents themselves who rent and help newcomers.

Cepaim, which works with migrants from Molina de Aragón, points out the same pattern across the whole district: finding a job is not enough if there is nowhere to rent, no transport, and no services. In Poveda, that was exactly what happened: there were jobs and no houses.

Other arrivals have come through tourism. Yolanda Temprado returned to Armallones, where she spent summers as a child, renovated her father’s house, and opened tourist apartments and a hostel in Villanueva de Alcorón.

Where all this comes from

The closed houses are the final chapter of a long history: that of the villages that emptied, with their census figures from 1842 to the present. The lives of those who left are found in The Bread That Paulino Kept and in «At your age I was already a hired hand», and those of people arriving or returning, in Those Who Also Told the Story of the Village.