The new data published by INE confirm the trend of recent years: the population decline of Galicia.
According to these data, Galicia (not including the figures of Eastern Galicia areas beyond Xunta administrative rule) is already below the 2.7 million inhabitants, specifically 2,699,299, the lowest figure since 1972. This is a consequence of a vegetative balance negative – WHEN figures compared to the first half of the year – show a net loss of 9,135 people and an “internal” migratory balance vis-à-vis other regions of the State, that is also negative with less 138 people.
As we have analyzed in this portal on several occasions, this is not an accidental phenomenon, but a symptom of what is planned for the empire’s peripheries, using the words of Tiqqun, to convert them into simple sources of raw resources.
The statistics published by the INE also confirm that the population decline is particularly concentrated in rural areas, while cities maintain or even increase the number of inhabitants.
Decline on demographics used as a justification
With this scenario as a backdrop, the Xunta government announces a set of urbanistic measures that will further soften the current restrictions to build on qualified land , known as “Solo Rústico” , that means reserved for farming and with any residential or real state purposes allowed….till now .
The autonomic government justifies these measures because, they say, sound to “dynamize and fix the population in rural areas, by facilitating support for the construction and rehabilitation of villas on rustic soil.” The administrative process to give legal protection to these measures has already begun this Thursday done by the Xunta`s Council Board, and where a modification of the regulation that develops the Law of the Land of Galicia was approved.
Among the measures that the Board intends to establish, is to allow the construction of temporary housing for workers, when some “productive cycle demands periodically, the coordinated work of people that the local labor supply can not meet”, and out of season these houses can be used for rural tourism.
It will also be possible to build more store houses linked to agricultural operations, and will also allow the construction of tourist hostels in areas of touristic influence across the Camino de Santiago.
The Way of Saint James is the chicken of golden eggs for tourist big bussines.
After these measures is always disguised , and for now unmaskedly, the interest of extending the tourist business to expand into our rural world, in particular to the regions linked to the Way of Santiago.
Compostela is already reaching a limit situation as soon as it has suffered during the last decade an extraordinary process of touristification. And that is why it is now difficult for businessmen in the tourism industry to increase their profits inside the city itself. This business sector intends to take the opportunity to explore the entire path of St James, for which it has the complicity of the right-wing PP government, who will soon modify all the laws that were lacking to increase and warrant their profit.
This is how, from now on, it will be possible to construct tourist facilities where, until now, only agricultural and livestock farms could be built.
It is to be expected that the current process leading to closings of small farms will continue because both the Spanish government and the Xunta maintains a policy that provokes the necessary territorial unbundling of the population: cuts on schools, cuts on resources at health care centers, further denial on public transport facilities to country small areas or even increasing the regulatory burocratic demands to open set, or even hold small-scale and agricultural farms.