Rural Spain's Call
Journalist Paulino Guerra Urges Protection for Rural Spanish Populations in New Book
Paulino Guerra, former deputy director of Europa Press for over 20 years and a journalist with more than four decades in the trade, has a stark warning: the people of rural Spain are "an endangered species." His new book, *Historias tristes de Colomba*, published by Círculo de Tiza, is both a literary elegy and a political alarm for a country watching its villages die.
The book uses a fictional village called Colomba — based on Moral de Hornuez, a hamlet in the province of Segovia — to tell the story of Spain's depopulated interior. Guerra argues that bureaucracy, the digital divide, and political neglect are quietly extinguishing a way of life that cannot be recovered once it is gone.
A Journalist Turns His Lens on Dying Villages
Guerra spent over 40 years covering Spain's corridors of power for Europa Press. Now he has turned that same journalistic precision toward the Castilian steppe. He describes the prose in *Historias tristes de Colomba* as "journalistic in its precision but poetic in its mourning." It is a deliberate shift — from reporting on those who hold power to those who have been forgotten by it.
Colomba is Guerra's version of what writers like García Márquez did with Macondo. It is a stand-in for dozens of real hamlets across Segovia and Soria. In provinces like these, over 80% of villages have fewer than 100 inhabitants, according to data from the INE — Spain's National Statistics Institute. Guerra spent decades of weekends observing these places before committing them to the page.
Bureaucracy and the Digital Wall Crushing Rural Spaniards
Guerra's sharpest criticism is not aimed at indifference — it is aimed at active, if unintentional, harm. He says laws built for cities are slowly "outlawing" rural life. Digital signatures, online banking, and centralized health services assume users have fast internet and tech skills. Many elderly villagers have neither.
Guerra estimates that 30 to 40% of the remaining rural population in deep Castile is effectively cut off from the modern state. "The people of the villages are an endangered species," he told Levante, "and like the Iberian lynx, they need protection from the administration — not more hurdles." He frames this not as a lifestyle issue but as a basic human rights problem: citizens paying taxes for services they cannot reach.
Wind Farms and Telework Won't Save the Villages
Guerra is blunt about two popular "solutions" to rural decline. First, he rejects the romantic "telework-from-the-countryside" narrative pushed by some urban commentators. A village, he argues, is not a village without a permanent community, a grocery store, and a bar. Remote workers are not a community — they are temporary guests.
Second, he views the spread of wind farms and solar plants across the rural interior as a "new colonialism." Energy is extracted from the land to power the cities, while the local landscape is scarred and the people gain little. Regional leaders in Castilla y León have already cited Guerra's arguments to demand better funding for doctors and pharmacies — concrete services — rather than what he calls "symbolic" rural subsidies, according to El Periódico de Extremadura.
A Cultural Archive Before the Memory Disappears
Beyond the political argument, Guerra is racing against time. He warns that when the current generation of octogenarians in Segovia and Soria dies, a specific knowledge of the land — crop rotation cycles, local weather patterns, regional dialects — will vanish with them. No database holds this information. No government registry preserves it.
Analysts have called the book "a digital archive of a culture that does not exist in the cloud," according to Diario de Mallorca. The "España Vaciada" — or Empty Spain — has already become a political force, fueling movements like *Teruel Existe*. Guerra's high-profile media campaign since the book's May 2024 publication suggests this conversation is far from over.
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