In depopulated Spain, there are towns that are no longer waiting for a solution to come from outside: they are inventing it themselves. Arenillas, a town in Soria with barely 40 registered inhabitants, about two hours’ drive from Madrid, has launched an offer of free housing and stable work for families who decide to move there and make their life there. In less than a week, the town council and the village’s cultural association have received more than a hundred applications, to the point where they already have a waiting list of candidates willing to swap city life for the countryside.
Arenillas’ proposal is concrete and goes beyond the typical rural marketing campaign. The town council is offering a renovated municipal home (part of a group of seven houses restored in recent decades) at no rent to a family with school-age children who register as residents and stay to live there permanently. In exchange, the new residents will take over the management of the bar-social club, the true heart of the village, and one of the adults will take on a job as a bricklayer involved in the maintenance and renovation of municipal buildings.
The bar is not just a business; in a municipality with 30-40 residents in winter and around 300 in summer, it is the meeting point for neighbors, vacationers, and visitors. The job offer, for its part, provides a stability that is unusual in rural areas: it is not a one-off contract for a specific project, but a structural need linked to the maintenance of homes and public spaces that the local council wants to cover in the long term.
One of the key requirements is that the family has school-age children, because Arenillas’ strategy is not only to gain inhabitants, but also to ensure generational renewal. The children will attend the local school in Berlanga de Duero, with free daily school transport, and the distances to basic services are covered by the rest of the network of villages in the area.
The municipality points out that it has been working for more than forty years to curb depopulation: renovating municipal houses, maintaining the bar and social center, organizing cultural programming with the local association… The new campaign, they insist, is not an isolated publicity stunt, but the next chapter in an ongoing strategy to ensure that the village does not remain empty outside of August.
More than 100 applications and a waiting list
Editorial credit: Arenillas Town Council
The response has exceeded all expectations. In just a few days, more than a hundred families have filled out the form provided by the Town Hall to apply for housing and employment. The council and the cultural association are now in the middle of the selection process, assessing professional experience in construction or bar management, the composition of the family unit and, above all, the real motivation to adapt to a small town with harsh winters and limited services.
For those who look at Madrid with weariness and dream of space, time, and neighbors who know each other by name, this type of initiative has suddenly become a symbol of a possible alternative. So much so that the problem is no longer finding candidates… but choosing, from the waiting list, the family that best fits in with the village that is not resigned to disappearing.