A little more than an hour’s drive from Madrid, in the Torrijos region of Toledo, is Illán de Vacas: the village that holds the title of the smallest in Spain. With little more than 9 square kilometers of extension, this population has a total of three people registered according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) of the year 2023.
These same data allow us to extract other information about its inhabitants. Currently all of them are men, and that has long been the demographic reality of this population: no woman has been registered in Illán de Vacas since 2019.
And if we go back a little in time we can see that its population peak in the last 19 years took place in 2003, when five men and three women were registered.
A story that is told in just five lines
On the website of the Diputación de Toledo the history of Illán de Vacas is told in just five lines, which are summarized in brushstrokes about its origins dating back to the sixteenth century and a mention that the church is dedicated to the Assumption of Our Lady.
The last update about this small town on this website took place in February 2022, and has left a curious fact from that time for posterity: that year there were more councilors (3) than inhabitants (2).
The tabs dedicated to monuments or festivals do not include any information about Illán de Vacas, but in the “Gallery” section there are photographs that show an old station, the appearance of a typical house or the town center, which could vaguely remind someone of the island of La Graciosa, in Lanzarote, due to the particularity of not being paved.
The quietest villages in Madrid
Some time ago we published a list of the quietest towns in Madrid, with the understanding that “tranquility is synonymous with small population”. Although the populations of these villages in the Community of Madrid are also very small , they may seem like a multitude compared to this village in Toledo.
The quietest village in Madrid -and therefore, with less population- at the time of writing this article was La Acebeda, with a population of 67 inhabitants.