The villages that emptied

Nine in ten

The chart above shows thirty-six villages: all Alto Tajo municipalities whose boundaries have remained unchanged since 1900, added together census by census. In 1910, 17,571 people lived in them. In 2021, 2,319. Almost nine in ten left, or were never born there.

The curve does not fall evenly. Until 1950 the decline is slow, almost a trickle: the war, the postwar years and the first people leaving for Madrid. Between 1960 and 1970, Alto Tajo loses 39% of its population in ten years, and between 1970 and 1981 another 45% of those remaining. These were also the years of Guadalajara province’s greatest emigration: according to the INE, over 45,000 people left between 1961 and 1970, and the province had already lost over 150,000 through emigration since the beginning of the century.

Village by village

Behind the total are individual stories. Checa had 1,811 inhabitants in 1887 and 286 in 2021. Zaorejas reached 1,011 in 1930; by 1970 it had absorbed Huertapelayo but still had only 415. Taravilla fell from 420 to 32; Pinilla de Molina, from 360 to 11; Valtablado del Río, from 196 in 1900 to eight residents. Every village page in this atlas now includes its population curve using INE census figures.

To avoid mixing unlike figures, the total above excludes municipalities that merged or split along the way. Those mergers are themselves part of the story: between 1970 and 1981 Huertapelayo and Villar de Cobeta came under Zaorejas, Motos under Alustante, Valtablado de Beteta under Beteta and Villaescusa de Palositos under Peralveche. When a village can no longer sustain its council, it becomes a pedanía.

Why they left

There was no single cause. There were many, arriving almost together.

• Woodland trades faded. Entrepeñas reservoir blocked timber floating in 1954; resin declined against petroleum products and imports, and the province’s last factory closed in Villanueva de Alcorón in 1983. Transhumance on foot gave way to lorries.
• Farming became mechanised and needed fewer hands.
• Cities drew people in. Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza and Barcelona offered steady work, schools and doctors.
• Migration changed its form. For centuries, people in Checa left seasonally as shepherds, charcoal burners or labourers, then returned. This was migración golondrina, migration like the swallows. In the 1960s people began leaving permanently, and many young women went into domestic service in cities.

What life was like just before departure, with the common pasture enclosed by thorn branches, the communal oven and the Judas Pine, is told by residents of Valsalobre, Orea and Peralejos in a year in a mountain village.

The abandoned settlements

Some places reached the end.

Valtablado de Beteta, in the Serranía de Cuenca, was one of Beteta’s dependent villages and an independent municipality from 1850. Emigration in the 1960s and 1970s and the sale of its land to ICONA emptied it; in 1974 it came under Beteta again. Today it is a ruin, and an association of former residents preserves its memory.

Villaescusa de Palositos is documented from the Reconquest. Its church and cemetery remain, and its territory joined Peralveche in 1977.

Villanueva de las Tres Fuentes, called La Chaparrilla until the 19th century, lies in Sierra Molina within Orea’s municipality, surrounded by pine woods. It was abandoned over forty years ago.

Beside the Armallá saltworks, below a hill with Islamic remains, stands the former saltworkers’ hamlet, now ruined.

What remains

Few people and much territory remain. Across much of Molina and Alto Tajo, density is around two inhabitants per square kilometre, figures of a demographic desert in the heart of Europe. But there are also those who stayed, those returning each August and those who have arrived in recent years to live here year-round.

Depopulation is more than a statistic. It affects who can find work, schooling, transport and a home in which to stay. A closed house can preserve a family connection while remaining beyond the reach of someone who wants to live here.

The August return brings many families together, but cannot by itself sustain life during the rest of the year. That other part of the story, the lack of rentals and the needs of permanent residents, continues in A home to stay in.