A Spanish village with more bookstores than students

URUENA (Spain) • Standing on a hilltop in north-western Spain, Uruena overlooks a vast and windswept landscape of sunflower and barley fields as well as a famous winery. The walls of some shops are built directly into the 12th-century ramparts of the village.

Despite its rugged beauty, Uruena, like many villages in the Spanish countryside, has struggled in recent decades with an ageing and dwindling population that has left it stagnant at about only 100 residents.

There is no butcher and no baker - both had retired in the past few months. The local school has just nine students.

But for the past decade or so, one business has been thriving in Uruena: books. There are 11 stores that sell books, including nine dedicated bookshops.

"I was born in a village that didn't have a bookstore and where people cared a lot more about farming their land and their animals than about books," says Mr Francisco Rodriguez, the 53-year-old mayor of Uruena. "This change is a bit strange, but it's a source of pride for a tiny place to have become a cultural centre, which now also certainly makes us different and special compared with the other villages around us."

The attempt to turn Uruena into a literary hub dates to 2007, when provincial authorities invested about €3 million to help restore and convert village buildings into bookstores and to construct an exhibition and conference centre. They offered a symbolic rental fee of €10 a month to people interested in running a bookstore.

The plan was to keep Uruena alive with book tourism, modelling it after other rural literary hubs across Europe - notably Montmorillon in France and Hay-on-Wye in Britain.

Spain has one of Europe's biggest book-publishing markets, feeding a network of about 3,000 independent bookstores, and double that number if stationery shops and other places that sell books are counted.

But about 40 per cent of bookstores have less than €90,000 (S$132,400) in annual revenue, which amounts to operating "a subsistence business", says Mr Alvaro Manso, spokesman for Cegal, an association that represents Spain's independent bookstores.

"The trend is one in which size matters and more of the very small bookstores will disappear" as they have in other countries where book sectors have consolidated, he adds.

To help smaller businesses compete, Spain's culture ministry this month allocated €9 million in subsidies for the book sector to modernise and digitalise.

Mr Victor Lopez-Bachiller, who owns a bookstore in Uruena, says the survival of that huge nationwide network of bookstores in Spain, where readership levels are not particularly high, is "one of the great paradoxes of this country, but I think we're living in a kind of book bubble".

Because the rent is low, he can stay afloat by selling an array of second-hand books, everything from Spanish-language classics, such as Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo - after which his store is named - to comics like Tintin. His shop also displays about 50 models of old typewriters said to have been used by writers such as Jack Kerouac and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Mr Lopez-Bachiller, 47, is among the some 100 residents of the village, most of them pensioners.

Journalist Tamara Crespo and her photographer-husband Fidel Raso bought a house in Uruena in 2001, before the effort to turn the area into a literary hub. They also run a bookstore there now.

Says Ms Crespo, whose store focuses on photojournalism: "I feel that being here is not just about wanting to have a rent-free bookstore, but also embracing a certain way of life and building up a community."

One of her few complaints is that some other bookstore owners open only sporadically, mainly on weekends when they know that there will be more visitors, even though the investment project stipulates that their shops should open at least four days a week.

Mr Rodriguez acknowledges that becoming a tourism destination was no guarantee that more residents would move in and keep the village alive. The recent retirements of the shopkeepers were more proof of that.

"It's very unfortunate, but we simply couldn't find anybody from the younger generation here willing to take over as our new butcher," says the mayor.

The morning's bread and meat are now delivered from a neighbouring town.

The unfavourable demographics of rural Spain - a phenomenon now known as "La Espana vacia", or "empty Spain" - will present a continuing survival challenge, he says.

Nonetheless, the bookstore initiative has borne fruit.

Uruena was selected for the subsidies because of its scenic location and picturesque buildings - and because of its relatively easy-to-reach location. It is off a highway in north-western Spain and just over two hours' drive from the capital Madrid and about 48km from the mediaeval city of Valladolid.

The tourism office in Uruena registered 19,000 visitors last year, even in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Officials say the actual number was far higher because many day-trippers do not stop at the office. The village also gets about €70,000 a year in public money to organise cultural events such as calligraphy classes, theatre performances and conferences.

Even before the bookstores arrived, Uruena had cultural attractions.

A long-time resident, Mr Joaquin Diaz, is a Spanish folk singer and ethnographer. Diaz, now 74, moved to Uruena from Valladolid in the 1980s and lives in an old building where he has gathered a vast collection of traditional instruments, books and recordings. His home was turned into a museum by provincial authorities three decades ago.

"I'm a realist and I don't believe in getting too nostalgic," says Mr Diaz about the loss of traditional stores and crafts in villages such as Uruena. "Overall, life is much easier now in the Spanish countryside than 50 years ago, and nobody could ever imagine that books could ever get sold and help save this village when I arrived here."

NYTIMES