What Life Is Like for the Last Two Inhabitants of a Small Spanish Village

This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

Elvira Parada and Antonio Rodríguez are both 87 years old and the only inhabitants of Pradelas – a small mountain village in Galicia. Galicia is one of the regions in Spain that's most affected by rural depopulation – every week, one village in the area becomes depopulated, with 3,562 of them already being deserted. Elvira and Antonio tell me that when they were younger, their village was full of life. The villagers used to go up the mountain every day, and they would organise little parties or events everyone could take part in. Most of them were farmers and they were all happy to be self-sufficient, living in sync with nature.

But the last generation of people born in Pradelas left the village as soon as they could and now there's nobody left. If anything were to happen to them, Elvira and Antonio wouldn't have anyone to help them but each other.

For years now, Antonio has had respiratory problems – he practically lives connected to an oxygen pump. One of their children visits regularly to bring them the basic necessities. "We almost never leave the house. We have a little vegetable garden, but it's been very cold outside. We used to have a lot of animals, but we can't really look after them any more."

Elvira tells me about how, "Once, years ago, we were sitting in the living room in the middle of the night. The house was struck by lightning and there was a power outage while my husband was connected to the oxygen pump. I was so worried that I couldn't think straight. I tried to call an ambulance, but of course the telephone didn't work either. I had to go out, walk over the mountain at that hour, to get to A Pobra do Brollón, the closest village. The locals there managed to call an ambulance, which luckily came in time. It was an awful scare."

To Elvira this isn't a life worth living - mostly because at any moment the power could cut out again, this time without a happy ending. "The baker doesn't come up here anymore, and if we want to buy food, we have to walk for an hour to get to the next village." Why do they still want to live in Pradelas all alone, when they could be living with their children in the city? "Despite being so ill, Antonio doesn't want to leave the village where we got married and built our a family. It is our home and he wants to be here until the day he dies," says Elvira. She would prefer to be in Pontevedra with her son, but a move would make her husband so sad it would crush him. "Taking Antonio out of his beloved village would be much worse for his health," she assures me.