Demothanasia. Death by depopulation.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project © Adra Pallón - House abandoned after the death of the elderly person who lived there. Inside, everything was left as she left it. © Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project View all images ↓
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Death by depopulation is slow and silent. It is merciless with the territory, nature, and heritage. This also honors those who, despite facing adversity, continue to inhabit these lands, resisting and preserving their culture and environment.

Demothanasia is the process by which political actions or omissions lead to the disappearance of a territory's population. Death by depopulation is slow and silent. It is merciless with the territory, nature and heritage. The situation is no less dramatic for the people who live or, rather, resist in rural areas. Those who live in the most absolute solitude in a silent, silenced and misnamed empties lands. In reality, it is not yet empties.

Europe is the most ageing continent in the world. In rural areas there is a high percentage of elderly people with a lack of residential autonomy or with a certain degree of dependency who are reluctant to leave the land where they have lived all their lives. They live alone where care and assistance are conspicuous by their absence. Extremely worrying social contexts in the face of insufficient resources on the part of the administration and the passivity, full of implicit violence, of the political actors involved. A large part of the ageing population is abandoned in these areas with a lack of care and very limited social and health care coverage.

These are traditionally smallholding territories due to the sinuous orography that makes intensive production impossible. The current voracious market of macro-production and over-production, the lack of quality telecommunications and connections means that the demographic pyramid in most of the territories is inverted. There are population centres where the pyramid does not even have a base due to the low birth rate and the massive rural exodus.

The depopulation of rural areas is one of the causes of numerous environmental problems such as the increase in the voracity of forest fires. Soil is no longer used for grazing or cultivation and is occupied by intensive plantations of highly pyrophytic alien species.

If there are no changes in this respect: the death of the last rural inhabitants will bring with it the death of a social model and then they will be an empties territories.



© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Olga is 91 years old and despite her age she walks several kilometres around her village every day. Her son, who used to live in the city, has had to return to the village where only they are left to look after her.

© Adra Pallón - House abandoned after the death of the elderly person who lived there. Inside, everything was left as she left it.
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House abandoned after the death of the elderly person who lived there. Inside, everything was left as she left it.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Fernando's hens in the countryside. Precariousness is present in rural environments. Those who live off the land have a hard time economically. "What saves me is that I hardly spend on food because I eat everything I produce and my animals produce," says Fernando.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Adela and Manuel are the last inhabitants of a village that once had 13 inhabited houses. Adela and Manuel finish the wintry and rainy day playing cards, guarding the animals and collecting eggs from their chickens.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Luis lives alone in a house with no windows. The situation in which he lives evokes moments from the past. He says that he doesn't change the windows or fix the house because when he dies nobody will live there and the few family he has emigrated long ago.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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In Cantorcia there is only one inhabited house left. The rest have been abandoned years ago. This is one of them and little by little the undergrowth is swallowing it up. Since the sixties, the process of rural exodus has left an average of one village a week uninhabited in the region of Galicia, in the north of Spain.

© Adra Pallón - Domingo picks potatoes to make food. Domingo is 88 years old and lives alone in an isolated village in A Fonsagrada.
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Domingo picks potatoes to make food. Domingo is 88 years old and lives alone in an isolated village in A Fonsagrada.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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The apples that Domingo picked are still on top of the kitchen. They keep well over the winter. Domingo is 88 years old and lives alone in an isolated village in A Fonsagrada.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Oliva kisses the photo of her late husband. Oliva is 89 years old and lives with her daughter. She holds a photo of her husband, whom she misses. Until recently he lived with them, but he has passed away.

© Adra Pallón - Manuel lives alone in an isolated village in the province of Lugo. He spends most of the winter in the kitchen by the fire.
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Manuel lives alone in an isolated village in the province of Lugo. He spends most of the winter in the kitchen by the fire.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Domingo is 88 years old and lives alone in an isolated village in A Fonsagrada. He lights the wood stove on a cold winter night.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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A hundred-year-old tree burns in the most important fire in the history of Galicia. The fire is advancing out of control towards the village of Folgoso do Courel. The village has been evacuated for fear of being burnt to the ground as has happened to nearby villages.Galicia is one of the regions with the highest number of forest fires in Europe. This is because the rural exodus led to a continuu

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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The fire is advancing out of control towards the village of Folgoso do Courel. The village has been evacuated for fear of being burnt to the ground as has happened to nearby villages.Galicia is one of the regions with the highest number of forest fires in Europe. This is because the rural exodus led to a continuum of alien and pyrophytic species instead of the traditional mosaic landscape that s

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Working day of one of the last shepherds of Manzaneda, Manolo de Palleirós. The goats and sheep spend the summer in the curro, an enclosure where they sleep and eat grass from the meadows during the day. The Palleirós brothers take turns to be with them in the mountain for days.

© Adra Pallón - José prepares his food. He lives alone in A Fonsagrada despite his advanced age and difficulty of movement.
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José prepares his food. He lives alone in A Fonsagrada despite his advanced age and difficulty of movement.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Enrique lives alone with his dog in Oural since his mother passed away two years ago. He spends his days tending to his animals and walking through the mountains of a territory that is in the process of disappearing due to depopulation.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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Eighty-year-old José prepares breakfast for his 90-year-old sister. He takes care of her all day long because she is bedridden.

© Adra Pallón - Olga looks at the first rays of sunshine through the window after getting out of bed.
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Olga looks at the first rays of sunshine through the window after getting out of bed.

© Adra Pallón - Image from the Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. photography project
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It’s early morning in Terra Chá, in the province of Lugo, with a cloudy day over the plains, where the rural exodus is also noticeable, despite being the area with the most livestock activity in the province.

© Adra Pallón - A crucifix inside a now uninhabited house in the village of Pradela.
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A crucifix inside a now uninhabited house in the village of Pradela.

Demothanasia. Death by depopulation. by Adra Pallón

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