Shared by Romina Arévalo:
The topic that I have chosen is the one that deals with Depopulation in Castilla y León.
I have chosen this topic because, if affects our students directly and also because it is related to real life.
The step one is the title of the topic" Depopulation in Castilla y León".
Driving Question on the blackboard:
How could we raise awareness about depopulation in Castilla Y León?
Contents:
-Causes of depopulation in Castilla y León
-Destinations
-Effects.
I will choose an article in English about depopulation in Castilla y León (see bellow).
https://then24.com/2022/02/12/the-paradoxes-of-castilla-y-leon-depopulation-despite-industry-lack-of-services-and-record-number-of-municipalities/
Furthermore, I will show them a video on youtube to catch more their attention.
After watching the video I will ask them several questions:
- What is depopulation?
- What is the region in Spain with the lower number of inhabitants?
- Why is this happening?
- What should we do to avoid depopulation?
- How hard is it to avoid depopulation?
Cooperative work:
I will put my students in pairs to discuss about these questions. The students will share their knowledge to the whole class.
Final Product: The students will create a video to display it at the Exhibition hall of Valladolid tourist office.
Article about depopulation in Castilla y León:
https://then24.com/2022/02/12/the-paradoxes-of-castilla-y-leon-depopulation-despite-industry-lack-of-services-and-record-number-of-municipalities/
The paradoxes of Castilla y León: depopulation despite industry, lack of services and record number of municipalities
Icon of the problem of depopulation, this autonomous community leads the ranking of the highest rate of aging in Europe if the population over 85 years of age is served. An enviable life expectancy that has a bitter face: the lack of children and without them, of future, despite the fact that in the PISA Education reports it achieves results higher than the Spanish average.
With this context, its citizens will go to the polls this Sunday probably aware that “there are no magic solutions” to their problems, but with the intuition that “the future costs of not acting may be greater than the present ones”, as this week the ICADE Economics professor, Jorge Díaz Lanchas, who has just presented a report together with ESADE EcPol under the title Depopulation and politics of place in which he analyzes the gap between the urban and rural world.
“Castilla y León has in decline five centuries. For a long time, she was subjected to very high taxes to satisfy the periphery. It represented between 20 and 30% of the Spanish population, but now only 5%. However, the victimizations that lead us to confrontation and, furthermore, are based on lies, do not take us anywhere,” Alejandro Macarrón reflects in a conversation with this newspaper from the Demographic Renaissance Foundation, in relation to platforms of the emptied Spain , such as Soria ¡Ya! or the internal secessionist movements that have emerged in León.
Sheep in Cabreriz. Soria.
Europe Press
According to their data, the depopulation suffered by Castilla y León is not only caused by the emigration of its inhabitants to large cities, such as Madrid or Barcelona, in search of opportunities.
“The low birth rate has affected depopulation almost more than emigration with an average of 1.28 children per woman in the last 40 years,” says Macarrón. This figure is lower than the average for Spain in that period. For example, in Andalusia or Murcia that ratio exceeds 1.7 children per woman and experts consider that children help set population.
Beyond the demographic problem, another dysfunction is added that affects both the dispersion of the population and the economy: the large number of town halls that are spread over the territory with the lowest population density in the country (25 inhabitants per square kilometer, compared to 93 on average). This complicates the governance of it and further fragments the figures. But, in addition, it affects the high cost of providing basic services to the population -Education and health centers by the public sector, but also financial services-.
An eloquent fact is that the autonomous community has more than 3,600 rural clinics, but they do not have enough doctors to be 100% open. This significantly affects 700,000 people living in areas with difficult coverage. And the Junta de Castilla y León itself has recognized that there are difficulties in hiring more than 350 missing doctors.
Bringing Education to these municipalities is also more complex, since the cost of child per classroom is higher. However, despite this difficulty, 15-year-old Castilian students always figure among the best in Spain in data on reading comprehension, mathematics or global competition in the PISA Report, something that is also influenced by the importance that the majority of the inhabitants of Castilla y León have historically given to access to studies.
Record of municipalities
“There is a great fragmentation of municipalities that no one wants to merge but that no private company would allow because it is inefficient,” says Macarrón.
Burgos leads the podium of the province with the most municipalities in Spain. It has 371 municipalities, according to the INE. In Castilla y León there are a total of 2,248 municipalities. They are 27.6% of those in Spain to cover the needs of 4.9% of the country’s population.
With the data prior to the pandemic, two out of 10 workers in this autonomous community (19.6%) were civil servants. It is a proportion similar to that of Asturias and both autonomies occupy the second position with more civil servants from Spain behind Extremadura.
A) Yes, the public sector represents 19.4% of the region’s GDP, compared to 1.5% who provide information and communications or 5.2% of the liberal, scientific, technical and auxiliary services professions. To put these data into context, we can see the example of Madrid with a weight of the public sector of 13.6% (despite being the capital), but 8.7% in information and communications and 13.8% in professional, scientific and technical activities, as well as ancillary services.
To the extent that per capita income measures the well-being of citizens, in Castilla y León (23,167 euros) it is somewhat below the national average of 23,690 euros (year of the pandemic). However, in 2019, the distance that separated its inhabitants from the average of the Spaniards reached 1,510 euros.
However, in the economic composition of Castilla y León there is a very positive fact that is often left in the background: the strong industry weight -with a prominent presence of manufacturing- is higher than the national aggregate when representing a Gross Added Value (GVA) of the 20.1%according to 2019 data compiled by CaixaBank Research.
Specialization in the sector of automotive and in the agri-food explain this good data and the importance of the region for the country’s exports. To this is added the role that many of its provinces are taking in the generation of renewable energy.
The problem is that although in places like Valladolid or Burgos a good part of this activity is concentrated in other areas, industrial decline of the reconversion of the mining sector is wreaking havoc and deepens the problems of the emptied Spain. According to the aforementioned study by CaixaBank Research, the province of León lost more than 50,000 inhabitants due to industrial reconversion between 1998 and 2019.
This situation widens the gap between these territories with the central axis of the Castilla highway (A-62) that connects Valladolid-Palencia and Burgos, where the industry has shown to be dynamic and capable of exporting, explains the bank’s research service
He too sightseeing It has an important weight both for its cultural appeal and for rural leisure, despite the fact that it has been damaged by the pandemic. And in this case, its proximity to Madrid is an important asset, although the heritage of the region has meant that the number of foreign visitors represents an ever-increasing percentage among 1.8 million who visited this land before Covid-19.
However, when thinking about the economy of Castilla y León, many readers will think of the agriculture and livestock sector. The weight of the countryside in the GDP of the region is 5.6%, according to the Junta de Castilla. It is a relevant figure, but lower than that of the industry.
However, this presence of agriculture in the economy -and the importance it has in less industrialized areas- has marked the labor market, which would have influenced the fact that in recent decades, female emigration has been greater than male, according to the Demographic Renaissance Foundation.
The statements of the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, to Guardian criticizing the so-called Spanish macro-farms, he has starred in a good part of this electoral campaign that ended this week with the announcement of PERTE for the agri-food sector announced by the Council of Ministers last Tuesday.
And it is that European funds are an opportunity for Castilla y León. Not only to promote industry and the transformation of sectors such as the agri-food, automotive or the development of activities that are booming -such as organic farming-.
As the ESADE EcPol document recalls, in the Recovery Planthe government has included a commitment of 10,000 million euros for this objective (data that includes all of Spain). The problem is that this amount, the report adds, “groups very varied and ungrounded policies.” Something that occurs in a country in which “the debate on what policies and investments work has so far been completely absent,” says the report. And this electoral campaign has not been an exception to this lack of analysis to give a future to a region in which realities as opposed as industrialization and depopulation coexist.
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