The day begins and Sergio Rello puts the children in the car to take them to school. She asked the baker via WhatsApp to leave three loaves of bread at her neighbor’s house and paid for them via Bizum. Today he will spend time in the garden, go for a walk and go to work at the Arrúbal combined cycle power plant. His wife, a family doctor in the area, will pick up the children at the end of her consultations and will return home with them to spend an afternoon of games and contact with nature and the elderly.
With this quiet routine, this family from Logroño has completely changed the life of an entire village. With them, youth and joy have returned to Las Ruedas de Ocón, a corner of La Rioja where just over twenty people live. By settling in with their two little ones, just over a year ago, they have not only lowered the average age of the town by several decades but have also managed to show those around them that rural life, contrary to all the myths that haunt it, yes it is possible for a young family.
It was in 2019 that Sergio and Beatriz began to consider looking for a second home in the city. The pandemic arrived and, like so many others, it changed their plans. At that time, their first child was born and, taking advantage of maternity and paternity leave, they went to spend a month in their father’s city, Soria. “There we began to discover that all the ideas we had been given about the difficulties of living in the city were wrong,” says Sergio, “we saw that it was not so impossible and we began to think about it more seriously.”
“There have been no children in the city for 15 years, they brought joy to our streets”
Ruben Gil Trincado
— Councilor of the Ocón Town Hall
And so it was that shortly after, they bought a plot of land in Las Ruedas de Ocón, an area that his wife knew well thanks to her work, and they began to build their house, thinking more of a house for everyday life than a weekend residence. In July 2023, they settled permanently in the municipality, with a child of almost three years old and another of just over a year old.
The next step was to look for a school. “Murillo was ours, but a big school, with twenty children per class like those in a city, was not the model we wanted; in our desire to change our lives, we wanted a rural school for our children, one where the classes are small and mix children of different ages,” explains the father. For these reasons they chose the CRA of Galilee. Now, his child shares a class with eight other classmates aged three to five and the little one goes to the daycare at the same center.
Now they clearly know that they were not wrong. “Our family told us that we were going to go to a city, that at least in the city you see people every day, but the reality is that in Logroño, from my house to the center, I could meet 3,000 people and not speak to anyone. of them, while here I meet a dozen and it takes me an hour to get home because I stop to talk to everyone, they ask me how I am or if the beans have come out in my garden. There are fewer people, but the closer and friendlier relationships more than compensate,” he explains.
The change has not been just for them. Ruben Gil Trincado, councilor of Las Ruedas in the municipality of Valle de Ocón, assures that this family has considerably improved the life of the town. “When they arrived, there had not been a child in these streets for 15 years, and before that, another 30 years,” he says, “now joy has returned to the daily life of the town because there are always two little children. in the streets; They have become the children and grandchildren of the 20 neighbors who live here year-round. Their arrival has been the best news for the town and for the school and I am also sure that it will invite other families to settle in the area.
This daily contact with the elderly in the city is for Sergio one of the main advantages in raising his children. “Their four grandparents are very young and if they had grown up in the city, they would never have had contact with elderly people like they have here where they go to the neighbor for a piece of bread, they are the plaything of the city,” he says. Contact with nature has also been a plus in this new life. “We like our children to know where things come from because here we can have a garden in the garden, they can see where what we eat comes from, walk around, see animals. We felt that life in the city had become denatured and here we can teach them this reality of contact with the land and with people,” he explains.
To combat depopulation, we need to change our narrative and end the false myths that began to spread in the 1970s.
They do not find any flaw in this new life project. They are aware that in ten years their children will have other needs and that they will spend more hours driving taxis, “but that will come, we do not look any further because life takes many turns”. The truth is that for the moment, they do not miss anything in the city. “Here we use the car daily but when we lived in Logroño we did it too, we traveled even fewer kilometers but sometimes it took longer. Now we do our shopping every ten or fifteen days and we have a good pantry in the garage, everything is more organized and nothing is ever missing, whereas in the city, since we knew we could do our shopping at any time, we often lacked things”, explains Sergio, “and we do online shopping, but before we did that too.”
However, even if it does not concern them, they see an inconvenience for their neighbours: public transport. They explain that in Las Ruedas there is only one bus on Mondays and Fridays, “and sometimes the bus arrives and no one gets on, but on Wednesdays there is an older lady who has to go to Logroño for something”. That is why they believe that rural life would improve greatly if on-demand transport services were installed in all these areas. Something the councillor also agrees with: “It would be beneficial for everyone, for the population and for the service itself, and we have transferred it to the Government of La Rioja”, confirms Gil Trincado.
In any case, Sergio defends that “services will not return to the cities before the people.” That is why his commitment to rural life is firm and he tries by all means to break the false clichés. “After studying a lot about emptied Spain, I think that what needs to be done is to change the discourse,” he says, “life in the cities was so vilified in the 70s that this message has penetrated deeply. The tradition has been established that cities are for the weekend and the summer, there are even many people who often go to their cities because that is where they feel good, but they do not dare to take the step because what has been done is always denigrate this lifestyle. It is clear that, if you like it and your work allows it, rural life is perfectly feasible today. He only had to try for a month. There are some who still do not dare.
