The Depopulation and Depopulation in the Municipalities of the Province of Ciudad Real (D2CR) project has come to an end this summer after five years of analysis that have left a tool to understand the phenomenon of the drop in population and why it occurs in some localities and not in others. The project has ended with a report in which it analyses what happened in the years of the pandemic and concludes that it is migration that has made the downward trend in some localities turn into an increase in population, and that the so-called COVID effect, the return to small municipalities, was not such.
The director of D2CR, Francisco Ruiz, explained that the report was prepared with the data available for the year 2023, “the latest official data” that exist, and where “it has been observed that in the province there has been a recovery of the population in recent years, following the general trend of Castilla-La Mancha and Spain”. In this sense, from the analysis carried out in this five-year period of research they already knew that between 2008 and 2010 there was a drop in population that lasted until 2016 or 2017, when some 30,000 Ciudad Real residents were ‘lost’.
The recovery, he explained, has been due to migration because natural growth, the difference between deaths and births, remains negative. “This is a phenomenon due to ageing” and the fall in birth rates. According to his analysis, all municipalities, by population segment, have increased the number of foreign-born inhabitants. In fact, it is internal migration, those born in Spain who move to other municipalities, which has caused the population to fall in the last 20 years. This is a situation that only Ciudad Real capital, the only municipality in the province with more than 50,000 inhabitants and the only town that has grown in those born in other provinces, has escaped. This situation leaves a balance of 22,000 more inhabitants in the province in the last two decades, taking migration into account, according to the tables in this latest report.
Migration slows population decline more than COVIDHowever, Ruiz recalled that “we are still one of the provinces with the lowest percentage of immigrant population, 9%, when the average for Spain is 18%,” but it has recovered a lot and that has contributed to improving the population data.
As for COVID, the document states that it “had an impact” on mortality, but only for one year, since there was then even a decrease in deaths that could be predicted from the statistics of previous years. “In 2021, COVID mortality is almost unnoticeable and in the years 2022-23 mortality has been lower than in previous years.”
Regarding the return to small municipalities, Ruiz recalls that “in 2020 and 2021, the towns that improved proportionally were small ones”, due to the search for areas with a small population to avoid the virus, but, from 2022 onwards we returned to the trends that existed before, and that is that “the towns that lose the most population are the small ones”.
Migration slows population decline more than COVIDFor the professor, it is not so much a question of a lost opportunity with the pandemic, but of “trends” that have been there for years and that continue. “The reasons for these trends do not disappear by magic,” he said graphically. “The work that exists in small municipalities is what it exists,” recalling, for example, that teleworking that continues at the moment is more common in larger municipalities than in smaller ones.
Ruiz said that, after this latest report, the need to establish state strategies to “correct population imbalances” is once again seen. “The province can support municipalities, especially the smallest ones, to try to compensate for the inherent disadvantages of being small, but there are many factors that a province cannot act on alone” such as, for example, large infrastructures or migration policies.
«D2CR has provided data for each village»
«These five years of D2CR have meant having a very deep knowledge of the reality, town by town, and that was the objective», explains the director of this initiative, which he recalls arose in 2019, commissioned by the Provincial Council, which wanted to have a tool to implement measures and aid to the municipalities. «Now, each mayor of each town or each company can know the situation perfectly», he indicated. In fact, the initiative, in which Ruiz, Manuel Ángel Serrano and Ángel Ruiz Pulpón participate, as deputy director, all professors at the UCLM, deputy director, began by designing the tools to measure the phenomenon of depopulation, for example, how the agrarian economy or infrastructure is measured. Their work remains in the form of a website, alarcos.esi.uclm.es/d2cr/, in case there are future researchers who want to continue it.
