Observations from Europe

My family vacationed (or as they might say, “vacationed”) in Spain over the last couple of weeks, and we walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago from Sahagún to León. We had our three and six year olds in tow, so there were complaints, though many of them were most clearly articulated by the adults in the party.

A huge part of the draw of the Camino was to do something simple together, to appreciate and minimize, which we certainly did. But the things that were missing also stood out. It turns out a lot of the complaints have active policy literature behind them.

1. You can’t eat at a “normal” hour. Spain sits on London’s meridian and runs on Berlin’s clock, because Franco moved it in 1940 and nobody moved it back. Solar noon in Madrid falls after 1pm in winter and after 2pm in summer, so lunch at 2 and dinner at 9 are really lunch at 12 and dinner at 7. Spain did ask the EU in October 2025 to stop changing the clocks twice a year, but nobody is proposing to fix the hour that actually moved.

2. Everyone stays up too late (because of said late dinner), no wonder productivity is bad. Spanish productivity really is low, but not because Spaniards work too little. For example, they work more than Germans, not less: about 300 more hours a year, which is seven and a half extra working weeks. Spanish output per hour is about 63% of Germany’s.

3. These places feel empty. The Sahagún comarca has lost over 30% of its people and holds 6.1 per square kilometre. Four of Spain’s eleven emptiest comarcas are in the province of León.

4. You can’t buy a banana, and we’re two hours from Madrid. 4,632 of Spain’s 8,132 municipalities have no food shop at all.

You would think a potential answer is that more people move to Madrid, but increasingly they can’t. A new IMF working paper finds that without the price run-up in Spain’s high-productivity regions, roughly 63,000 more working-age people would have moved to them between 2017 and 2023. The observed net inflow was 1,700. Empty Spain and unaffordable Spain turn out to be one problem. Meanwhile the Camino set a record in 2025 with more than 530,000 pilgrims and 242,000 of them walked the route that runs straight through some of the emptiest parts of Spain where we were; a study commissioned by the Camino municipalities concluded, politely, that this does not fix it.

It’s worth pointing out that Spain is not short on capacity (windmills were a favorite for “I spy”). Between December 2019 and June 2025 it doubled its wind and solar, adding over 40 GW, more than any EU country except Germany, and its wholesale power price in the first half of 2025 ran 32% below the EU average.

To be clear, none of this made the trip worse (some low key suffering is good for personal growth!). The people still living in these towns are the reason the Camino works at all, and they were very good to us. It did send me looking for the research once we got home.