SIX young adults are facing prison and hefty fines for 'occupying' an uninhabited village in ruins in the province of Guadalajara (Castilla-La Mancha).
Deep in the heart of the Sierra Norte nature reserve and down a never-used forestry track, the hamlet of Fraguas was last occupied in the 1960s after the State, under General Franco's dictatorship, expropriated the entire village and forced its 40 inhabitants out.
It has only been used briefly for a few days in the 1990s for Army training.
Two women – Isa and Mila – and four men, Dani, Javi, Isato and Lalo, all city-dwellers, wanted to escape to the country and live a healthier, more natural existence.
They rebuilt three of the ruined houses in Fraguas using traditional construction materials – stone, mud-brick and wood – and techniques, restoring them to how they would have looked until the exodus.
They set up an allotment to grow their own fruit and vegetables, a pump in a well fed by a natural spring for their water supply, and solar panels for electricity.
The group has been living there peacefully for five years, but have now been ordered to leave and to pay the costs of 'un-restoring' the ruins, and could even face up to four-and-a-half years in jail.
MP for Guadalajara Alberto Rojo says it is not a case of wanting to lock them up, but the fact that they are living permanently in a green-belt area 'cannot be overlooked'.
Their solicitor, Erlantz Ibarrondo, says the group have done no harm, have respected the natural environment and have even repaired the forestry track with their bare hands.
Also, the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha has, in the past, given after-the-event permits for three other uninhabited, ruined hamlets in nature reserves – Umbralejo, La Vereda and Matallana – after members of the public set up home there.
Castilla-La Mancha is jointly run by the PSOE, or socialists, and left-wing Podemos – the latter of which has gone against its coalition colleagues by refusing to form part of the private prosecution.
It says punishing these enterprising youngsters goes against the multi-million-euro projects the government has been running for years to try to stop desertion from remote rural areas.
And they cannot be found guilty of building residential properties without planning permission, since they have not actually constructed anything that was not already there – they simply restord them in such a way that they now look the same as they would have done before they fell to rack and ruin.
The other half of Castilla-La Mancha's government says it is willing to support projects like that of the group in Fraguas, but not in nature reserves or green-belt land – only in the 218 villages in the province of Guadalajara which have fewer than 50 'legal' inhabitants.
Some of these villages now have a population that has fallen into single figures, and within a generation, will be empty.
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