BARCELONA, Spain, Aug. 27 -- Around half of Spain's municipalities are seeing declining populations, and many of these are at risk of extinction, according to researchers in Barcelona.

The United Nations has been warning of the phenomenon of urban concentration for some time. Although Spain's population surpassed 48 million for the first time in 2023, in the so-called "Espana vacia (Empty Spain)" regions, over 4,000 Spanish municipalities, about half of the total, have seen falling populations.

Meanwhile, 1,840 localities are considered rural areas at risk of irreversible depopulation, according to experts at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

The term "Empty Spain" refers to the agricultural-reliant regions in the vast interior of Spain that have suffered massive emigrations during the rural exodus of the 1950s and 1960s.

The towns most at risk of extinction have an average of 110 inhabitants, and very low population densities (an average of 4.3 inhabitants per square kilometer), while the average age of inhabitants is close to 60.

"As no one new is moving there, the effect is that depopulation is being accentuated, and this loss of population probably means that in the next 10 to 30 years a lot of these municipalities will disappear," Albert Esteve, director of the UAB's Center for Demographic Studies, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

According to Spain's Ministry for Territorial Policy, 90 percent of the country's population lives in 1,500 towns and cities occupying 30 percent of the land while the other 10 percent are distributed across the remaining 70 percent of the territory.

This issue has now become up to date but "the seed of what is now really becoming noticeable in the declining population figures was planted 40 or 50 years ago," Professor Esteve said.

"The origin of this population decline is in rural migrations in the mid-20th century when a lot of people left. While those who stayed were relatively young, these people are now getting older, and ... are beginning to die," he explained.

In August, Spain's National Institute of Statistics (INE) published the country's birth figures, confirming that this year, most babies were born in populated areas such as Madrid (25,936) and Barcelona (19,411). Meanwhile, the fewest births were registered in rural places such as Soria (242) and Zamora (350).

This phenomenon affects rural regions all over the country, especially Castilla y Leon, Asturias and Galicia in the northwest, Castilla-La Mancha in central Spain, Extremadura in the west, Rioja in the north, and Andalusia in the south.

The trend is set to continue, with the INE predicting that Spain will lose more than half a million inhabitants in the next 15 years, of which more than 70 percent will be in these communities.

As a response, the Empty Spain political party was formed in 2021 to defend the rights of Spain's sparsely-populated rural areas, while organizations like Greenpeace have been calling for policies to promote the development of these rural areas and preserve their environmental heritage.

However, passing legislation to deal with the problem is a slow-moving process, and so far this political term, only two of 22 legislative initiatives on the issue have been approved by parliament. One of these promotes mobility for young people in rural areas, while the other obliges local administrations to guarantee access to artistic higher education in rural areas.

  - Xinhua