The new paradigm: “Taking work to people rather than people to work.”
Let’s face it … most western European countries have experienced rural depopulation as young people have moved to the cities, leaving old people behind and even whole villages becoming depopulated.
However, the good news is that remote working is now enabling people to work wherever they like and some are being encouraged to move out of the cities to rural locations.
From empty pubs to working hubs: Ireland encourages remote work to repopulate rural areas
Before the pandemic, many of us would never have imagined working mostly from home.
But for some, it’s shown enough perks to become more permanent – and bring an end to commuting into a city.
Ireland is now hoping to bank on the trend to reverse decades of depopulation in rural areas.
The government has unveiled a plan to encourage workers to move to the countryside in droves, pledging to roll out superfast broadband, special grants, tax breaks, and to use rural pubs as daytime working hubs.
“We set up before the pandemic, and we’ve always seen that one of the biggest drivers of people leaving rural areas is jobs,” said Tracy Keogh, co-founder of Grow Remote, a non-profit connecting people to remote work jobs in Ireland.
“And when you can disconnect location from employment, you just free up where people can live and how they can live,” she told Euronews.
Watch the interview in the video here
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Spanish platform connects urbanites with villages to work remotely from
As the pandemic has prompted people to consider moving away from cities, a Spanish creative collective created a platform to connect those urbanites with small towns and villages around the country.
Over the past 50 years, Spain’s rural regions have lost 28% of their population, and there’s a real danger of towns and villages dying out. When populations thin out as drastically as they have in some parts of Spain, remaining residents face limited access to services and infrastructure. Meanwhile, for many employers and employees, 2020 demonstrated that remote working can be both possible and productive. Since expensive urban dwellings are often too cramped for working from home, interest in leaving for suburban and rural areas is growing.
Which is where Vente a vivir a un pueblo comes in. The platform, which was launched in Q4 2020, features 42 rural towns and villages that offer cheaper housing and a slower pace of life than cities, and are eager to welcome new residents. Users can filter pueblos by the type of internet connection they offer, population, available healthcare, distance from a city, etc. Each village or town is presented in a video, too, highlighting its surroundings, facilities, employment opportunities and housing prices.
Spain is hardly the only country facing dwindling rural populations after decades of economic migration from the countryside to cities. How could you play matchmaker for vijiji, falvak and Dörfer in your country?
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How to Work Remotely From Spain
Due to the characteristics of the new digital era, more and more individuals are becoming remote workers. The 9 to 5 in an office chair is no more a reality. Nowadays, workers from all around the world operate from countries that are completely different than those where their companies are located. That is what gave rise to the term digital nomad. And Spain is the perfect place to become a remote worker. No surprise that many of those workers choose it as its new working destination. But which is the exact process? How can you transition from working in your home country to becoming a digital nomad abroad? How to work remotely from Spain?
In this article, we are going to lay out everything you need to know in order to move abroad and start working remotely in the Spanish territory.
We want to help those of you who are tired of working in an office and would like to enjoy as much as possible their working routines in a wonderful country such as Spain. And that is why we will cover the main steps you need to follow and the considerations to be made in order to enjoy this amazing experience.
Read more
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FEATURE-The race to revive Spain’s dying ‘ghost villages’
MOLINS DE REI, Spain, June 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – W hen the air pollution in China caused his son to fall seriously ill nearly three years ago, Miquel Utge knew he had to get his family as far away from city living as possible.
The former chef took his family back to his Spanish homeland, moving to the mountains of Catalonia in the country’s northeast.
There, he bought a house in one of Spain’s hundreds of “ghost villages” – as dubbed by locals – a remote, nearly empty town where the family of four make up about half the total population.
“We had to come back from China immediately and the best place that I found was this, with its pure air,” Utge told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Utge and his wife now run an artisanal textiles business, grow fruit in their orchard and have access to “exceptional medical professionals” for their son, he said.
“Rural life here is very good.”
For some people, the ghost villages dotted around northern Spain, left over from half a century of economic migration from countryside to city, offer new opportunities and cheap property.
But for many locals and development experts, these villages – where an entire hamlet of several houses can be bought for less than 100,000 euros ($113,000)- are a sign of unchecked demographic decline and flawed economic policy.
“There is a huge discussion in Spain over rural depopulation at the moment,” said Paul Soto, a senior policy expert at the Brussels-based European Network for Rural Development (ENRD), which is funded by the European Commission.
The phenomenon began in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Soto said, when mechanisation made many agricultural workers redundant and masses of people moved to the cities looking for work.
Since then, many rural areas have struggled to recover, a problem that is partly due to “the country’s whole model of economic development”, he added.
With Spain’s economy geared around developing tourism and construction on the coasts, the middle of the country is being neglected, he warned.
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Lisbon is known as one of the top digital nomad destinations in the world, but what makes it a good place for digital nomads to live? In this video, get a tour of Lisbon, learn the basics of the city, rental prices, food prices, transportation, what life is like as a foreigner, and my top 5 reasons for choosing Lisbon as your digital nomad home base.
