La Vereda: rebuilding an abandoned town “for the love of art

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The Guadalajara Sidewalk The Vereda Guadalajara. By Borjaanimal “This vast territory embedded in the periphery of five Spanish communities, which extends across ten provinces and brings together 1,355 municipalities, this land where silence rides mountains and children's voices became hoarse last century has an average density of only 7.34 Inhabitants per square kilometer. Just like the icy, boreal Lapland.” This is how the journalist Paco Cerdà writes on the first page of his book The Last Ones. Voices from Spanish Lapland (Pepitas de Calabaza, 2017). And there is the province of Guadalajara , where many towns make even that minuscule number plummet. They are those forgotten by progress and its comforts. Until someone recovers through perseverance and love for the culture of a group of Quixotes and Sanchos Panzas.

We are going to meet a group of idealists who have been working for half a century to prevent the disappearance of a town : La Vereda, in the Ayllón mountain range , which today already belongs to the municipality of Campillo de Ranas (Guadalajara). About to be demolished to reforest the area The sidewalk The sidewalk. By Felipe Cuenca Cell Phone Number List Diaz First, a little history. In the 20th century, like so many other towns with harsh living conditions, La Vereda was left abandoned. In 1972 the Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICONA) expropriated the mountains and land to reforest the area; In 1976, a group of young people from Madrid mediated to prevent its demolition and that of the nearby El Vado – which was submerged in the current swamp – and Matallana. There, the La Vereda Cultural Association was born , which obtained the concession of the town in exchange for a rent (first from the state organization and, after its disappearance, the Ministry of the Environment of Castilla-La Mancha). Currently, this agreement is renewed every ten years.



A former partner who spent 20 years in the project and who prefers to remain anonymous explains that her “alma mater” was an architect who, with his partner and friends and colleagues, came to the area one day and fell in love with the town. , which was deteriorating after decades of neglect. Then they began the legal procedures to restore it. No electricity, utilities, road or bathroom The sidewalk The sidewalk. By Borjaanimal Unlike projects like Fraguas, in Guadalajara, or Barchel, in Valencia, in La Vereda the intention was never to inhabit it again. “This could not be repopulated ,” he says, given the harsh conditions in which it is located: in the middle of the mountains, without electricity, with water intakes that they have made themselves from a nearby spring, with an access track of 15 kilometers (initially, not even that), without public services and where the nearest town is about two and a half hours walk away.