THE LAND’S ONLY CHILDREN

In the desolate Portuguese countryside, there are three villages with a single child. In Santana, Macedo do Mato, and Vinhas, the days feel enormous and the last bastions of youth are geographically isolated.

The road into Santana is also the road out of Santana. On this road, an entire world. In that world, a single road that opens into other worlds. In this dead-end village, which bends toward a valley cut through by the Tagus River, a torrid breeze roams the paths and scatters the few living souls throughout their white houses. Around lunchtime, the ice-cream truck jingles. But most of the time there is silence, broken only by the warbling of birds. 

A green map is tacked to the wall of the village council building, right next to the only ATM. On it are hiking trails. A natural reserve brings people to this neck of Alentejo, where ruralness courses down streets like blood through veins. Where there is natural beauty, there are too few people. In this world built of absences, the days feel enormous. There is always time to spare. In the play park, quiet reigns. What was once an elementary school is now a museum. 

Sitting barefoot beside a measuring tape on the sofa, Isaura Lopes is proud to have the village’s last bastion of youth living under her roof. Her granddaughter, Maria Inês, has been in her care for twelve years. She is the only child in that village and breathes in the air of solitary living.

Santana is one of three counties in Portugal where there is only one child. It’s a sorry situation, and foreign to Isaura’s memories of that place. In her day, “it was cheerful,” buzzing with railway workers and fishermen. “There were a lot of people,” she says. 

Since there were no televisions at home, young men and women would gather at a local pub on Sundays to play o jogo da malha, a traditional Portuguese game similar to quoits. Most Saturday nights, you could hear the jingle of a village dance. “Just around here, where I live, there were two boys and two girls. On the next street over, another two. There were about twenty or thirty young women, all around the same age,” she sighs. 

And in her sigh is the weight of a silence broken only by her granddaughter. “Now I’m like their pet,” Maria Inês interrupts, with a cheerfulness her grandparents have attributed to her since she first entered their home at fifteen days old.  

For the young girl, the only landscape her neighbors’ memories evoke is this one. The oldest man in the village is ninety-six and lives in a nursing home, the only employer in the area. Unlike Maria Inês, João is not alone. He looks around him, and on days when his memory is generous, he gleans in the faces of the villages’ other seniors a bygone youth. 

More than 200 of Santana’s 277 residents are older than sixty-five and only seven are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. 

According to the 2021 Census, Maria Inês is the only person there under fifteen. 

And “she’s proud of it,” says her grandfather José Lopes. A former bus driver for the Rodoviária do Alentejo, he used to ferry dozens of children to the school in Nisa. These days, a small car comes to number 4 Rua da Independência just to pick up his granddaughter, then drop her off. “It breaks my heart that she never gets to ask us if she can go out and play with a friend,” he says in a small voice. 

When Maria Inês hears José and Isaura speak, her eyes are grateful and tender. In them, she seems to project both the person she is and the person she hopes to become—“a doctor, so I can look after my grandparents.”

In her pink room, where the drawings she makes in her free time are tacked to her closet door, Maria Inês confesses to being “shy, capable, and tidy.” Perhaps some aspect of those traits has to do with her being the only child of that land. Because she never had any other children to play with, she quickly got used to speaking with her stuffed animals, even though it made her “a little sad to have to pretend-talk to someone.”

She learned to make the most of her time. Besides cleaning her room, drawing, and riding her bike, she also enjoys studying. Her friends think it’s weird. 

“The kids in my class are constantly asking me why I’m always doing chores. And I tell them it’s because there isn’t anything else to do,” she says.

She matured at a young age, which isn’t uncommon for children who interact almost exclusively with adults. The kids hold them up as role models and copy their behavioral repertoire. 

Paula Cristina Martins puts forward that, “in a way, in cases like these, childhood as we know it doesn’t exist. This is why these children often end up being appreciated more by adults. Because they behave like them.”

A professor at the University of Minho and researcher at the Institute of Childhood Studies, Martins believes that a U.S. book called The Power of Place could offer an interesting starting point. 

“Our life journey has an address. Sometimes, it even hinges on the street we live on.” Along the way, we come to identify the zip codes of disadvantage and social exclusion. Still, Martins doesn’t want to give the impression that things are inevitable, because “there isn’t just one childhood, there are many childhoods.”

Human beings are remarkably good at adapting, at taking adversity and turning it into the raw material they can use to maximize potential.

Isaura herself recognizes that, “considering everything, if Maria Inês had someone her own age to play with she might be a little more rebellious.” But since she comes home from school to “a calm environment,” this is how she spends her time.

 

“She reads a lot and has already written letters,” Isaura says with pride. 

“And you give me advice every morning,” her granddaughter replies. 

Isuara falls silent and manages only to whisper, “yes,” her eyes bleary.  

“Be careful, don’t go holding anybody’s hand. Don’t take things from strangers. Pay attention in class,” Maria Inês reels off, as if she were giving a lesson. 

“Which isn’t nothing. . .” Isaura adds.

In the long hours between 5:30 PM, when she gets home from school, and 8:00 AM, when she leaves again, Maria Inês’s “salvation” is nearly always books. She reads up to three books a week. From them, she learns how to carefully choose her words and arrange them along the furniture of her thoughts. 

“They’re always telling me there are more work opportunities on the coast than inland. And it’s really true,” she laments. 

This is why she knows she will inevitably leave that place when she gets into university. And even though this still feels very far away to her, to her grandmother the prospect of an empty nest is around the corner. She only hopes her granddaughter “never abandons her grandparents.”

 

FRONTEIRAS DO INTERIOR

When speaking of the land where he won a council seat by a majority as an independent candidate, Joaquim Carita finds it easier to express praise than concern. We ride slowly on our mopeds to take in the view. 

“That over there is Conhal de Arneiro, where the gold mines were and where you can see the Portas de Ródão,” a natural monument on the Tagus River. But as inertia seizes the landscape, “people leave the county for jobs in the two nearest cities, Castelo Branco and Portalegre, while the people left behind start dying off.”

So much so that Santana has lost nearly a third of the 404 residents it had in 2011 in just ten years—and eleven children. 

The president of the village council is thirty-three years old. She is the fifth youngest resident. She shrugs and agrees that Santana’s aging population—a trend that feels somewhat inevitable—is no longer a topic of conversation. It’s not something people notice anymore. “It is what it is,” says Ana Guedelha. 

What will become of Santana in 20 years?

“Well, if things go on this way, the county will disappear,” replies Joaquim Carita.

“It’ll become a desert,” says Ana Guedelha. 

Paulo Machado, president of the Portuguese Demographic Association, agrees with Joaquim Carita and Ana Guedelha. 

“In just a few years, there’ll be no one left in the villages,” he predicts. The old are dying, and there aren’t enough young people to ensure generational renewal. 

This is how things are in a country whose population, according to the 2021 Census, has decreased over the last decade, for the first since the 1970s. 

The population has declined by 2%.

There are 15.3% fewer children in the 0 – 14 age range. 

This gave rise to a series of alarming phenomena. 

Mosteiro county in Laje das Flores, in the Azores, population 19, lost more than half of its residents, and was left without a single child. 

In 2011, there were six. 

Ten years ago, in Quintanilha, a county in the municipality of Bragança, there were only two children. 

Now there are an additional eight. 

The graying of Portugal began in the 1960s and has continued to this day. While the economic challenges faced by a largely impoverished population are not insignificant, a major contributor to this phenomenon is a marked decline in fertility rates, which can be traced to a different overall understanding of what constitutes family. This is itself an inevitable consequence of greater access to modern birth-control methods, which, with the appearance of the pill, only became stronger in the course of the following decade.  

“It completely revolutionized reproductive behavior in Portugal,” says sociologist and demographer Paulo Machado, who claims that “the first major sign of this change” took place in the 1980s. The country’s birth rate is currently under 2.1 children, which is on the threshold of the rate required for a generation to replace itself. But if this is one reason for the graying population, the “combined effect” is also due to emigration. 

Due to the Estado Novo’s colonial drive, especially in the late 1940s, many Portuguese men and women were encouraged to emigrate to the former colonies with the aim of weakening the burgeoning pro-Independence movements. This was just a prelude to what would come later. For economic reasons, the country began to see many Portuguese citizens, especially young ones, become emigrants. 

They mostly left rural areas. “We’re a country with a small population. If we all live in urban areas, there won’t be enough of us in other places, like the large swathes of Portugal beyond the interior,” Machado warns. With nearly half the population concentrated in only thirty-one of the country’s 308 municipalities, particularly in metropolitan areas like Lisbon and Porto, according to the last census, nearly all of the country’s interior has seen a steep decline in population. 

In a country as narrow as Portugal, what constitutes the interior?

It depends on how we define it. Geographically speaking, it’s the half of the country that does not touch the ocean, the part that has closer ties with the border region and Spain. “But our interior is much more than that,” Paul Machado observes. 

The interior has begun invading the coast.

 

THE PORTUGAL OF THE NEWS 

To Ramiro Arrátel, the definition couldn’t be clearer: “Interior is everything from Marão to here.”

His village, Macedo do Mato, in the municipality of Bragança, is typical of Trás-os-Monte, where stone walls sculpt the horizon. Beyond the rows of untidy houses is the silence of the mountain, broken only by a yellow bus that stops there twice a week on its way to Bragança. 

It is from this geographical point that Ramiro judges the world. There, in the second village with only one child. “It’s incredibly difficult to be president of the committee,” he laments.

Of the 208 people who lived in Macedo do Mato in 2011, only 178 are left. 

Over 100 of them are aged sixty-five and older. 

Only seven are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. 

Below that age range is a single girl whose family preferred not to comment. 

“As people die, houses are shuttered,” Ramiro Arrátel says when asked to give a snapshot of the situation in his county. 

There is no pharmacy, post office, or health clinic. There is still a café in the town center, where there are at most three or four patrons at a time. 

The village’s former elementary school remains in Elísio de Morais’ home: the desks, the fountain pens, the books he read when he was young; also the national flag, the chalkboard, and the maps of Portugal’s overseas provinces. 

He was young when his mother used to rent out their living room as a classroom for twelve escudos a year, “less than what it cost to travel to Bragança to get the money,” he said. 

Dona Antoninha was a teacher there for thirty years. She taught grades one to four. “And when classes were over, she’d put on a hair net, grab a broom, and sweep the floor,” he reminisces. 

Elísio maintains the school in pristine condition out of a sense of devotion. He has kept the same door and the same key. The old radio and music box sit beside a small collection of liqueurs that his wife makes in her spare time and later offers to guests.

On Rua do Cemitério, which winds from Macedo do Mato to Sanceriz and Frieira, the two nearest villages, is the same vast emptiness. 

Ominously, the younger generation of land-owning farmers no longer lives there, instead choosing to live in Bragança where, in the words of president Ramiro, “they have access to everything, from healthcare to entertainment.”

For the seniors who stay behind, there is a free taxi service to Izeda, the nearest county, which has some amenities, a “health clinic that allows patients to pay in installments”—and not much else.

This is how the village that Ramiro Arrátel has diagnosed as terminal continues to survive. 

“I’m convinced no one else will move here,” he says, revolted. “There are no incentives. This year’s drought is symptomatic. If I go to town hall to ask for help, even for the simplest things, they brush me off. Rural Portugal doesn’t have enough votes,” he says harshly, as if he had to commit in writing a country that is absent from the news. 

“If there’s no one around to constantly remind everyone that we exist, that we’re people too, that we contribute to the wealth of the county, then we’re easily forgotten. Politicians in Lisbon don’t care. . . Everything’s beautiful when people come here to visit. They eat and drink well. But then they leave and don’t give us another thought.”

Here lies another problem. The more people leave rural areas, the more these regions lose electoral representation. Meaning, they lose the political power to deal with problems that seem to only mount and intensify, driving away the few remaining residents. 

Demographer Paulo Machado agrees. He sees his own experience portrayed in Ramiro’s words. Even though he currently lives in Lisbon, he is registered to vote in a small village near Ferreira do Zêzere. 

“We have fewer than 250 voters. Voting in democratic elections is, I believe, one of the last forms of political sovereignty. I mail in my vote, but then there’s no health clinic, no doctor, no school, no transportation. . .” he explains. For this reason, the president of the Portuguese Demographic Association believes that the depopulation of Portugal’s interior is an issue of sovereignty.

“Unless we occupy the area, we won’t have sovereignty over it. We might formally have it, sure, but with myriad implications subject to a wide range of perspectives,” he says. First off, because no one voted for those regions to remain uninhabited, in part because that would make them “unmanageable from an environmental perspective.”

On the other hand, a region is never fully depopulated. 

Absurdly, if the country could cede part of it, doing so would probably be a mistake, given that, “despite everything, it remains rich,” says Paulo Machado, for whom a crude example of the asymmetry and inequality between different regions, is epitomized in internet access, which has the power to create first- and second-class citizens.

“Say I tell doctors they’d make more money in the country, but that they can’t use the internet? This would be costly for the country, but it would be worth it,” argues Paulo Machado. 

In Machado’s point of view, we are faced with the enormous task of reconsidering a slew of measures. One of them, which Spain has already dealt with, is assessing the use of demographic impact as a filter for policy measures, as is already the case with economic and environmental impacts. 

“We need to work collaboratively to leverage what we demographers call demographic sustainability,” he says.

 

FIVE HOPEFUL NOTES

Reception becomes spotty at several points in the long county that is Vinhas. 

Only five minutes from Macedo do Mato, where Ramiro lives, rise the peaks and ridges of the mountains where there is a village with narrow streets for avenues. 

This is the last place where there is only one child. The village is located in the municipality of Macedo de Cavaleiros, “the navel of the world.” Bragança remains the most sought-after city for those who leave the area, as many have throughout time. 

In this land of almond and olive trees, it seems the wind has found a resting place. It’s early morning on Praça Senhor dos Aflitos and there is a smattering of residents. It’s often here, next to Café Paris, that the few remaining villagers get together to swap stories in the dead hours of the day.   

Ten years ago, 236 people lived here. Now there are only 160. 

More than 100 are aged sixty-five and older. 

Around fifty are between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four. 

There are only six people between fifteen and twenty-four years old. 

Ricardo Simão, the only child in the village, is never seen around. 

At thirteen years old, the walls of his small room are the fortress he has constructed around his shyness. His hair and eyes are the same shade of brown. A couple of pimples redden his pale skin. He chooses his words haltingly. 

He’s gotten into the habit of hiding behind his sister Francisca, who is cheerful, older, faster, and also happened to be the same weight and height as her brother when she was born seven years before him. 

“Everyone in the village knows him,” she says. “He’s the only kid in Vinhas.”

Francisca left the village when she was admitted to nursing school at Bragança Polytechnic. Because Ricardo is familiar with these steps, he traces an identical path behind her. 

He knows he will be at the school in Macedo de Cavaleiros until he finishes 12th grade. “Maybe I’ll go to Bragança after,” he ponders, “to be a teacher or a veterinary nurse.” The same steps his sister took “in the same places,” would make a “good future,” he thinks.

And she smiles. Her brother is one of the reasons she decided to stay in Bragança. “Four years ago, he was even smaller, and he needed help with his studies. He has no one to study with here. I’ve always helped him out,” Francisca recalls. 

The siblings’ entire lives were shaped by the streets of Vinhas, where they helped their parents farm and raise cattle. Their mother, Maria José, remembers the parents of other children who were born in the village. “But they moved to France. No one wanted to be a farmer,” she laments. 

This is why, on school days, a bus driver religiously collects Ricardo at 7:30 A.M. on the dot and then rushes through other villages before dropping him off at school an hour later in Macedo de Cavaleiros. Nearly all his schoolmates live there. “Sometimes, he’s fifteen minutes late,” Ricardo points out. Whether or not he has enough classes to fill his day, the same bus religiously collects him again at 7:30 PM. Sometimes he has to go home even if he wants to stay later, and sometimes he has to stay later even if he wants to go home.

Holidays, when time seems breathless, are when Ricardo most keenly feels “the problem” of there being no one else in the village his same age. He divides his time between the keys of his computer, where he plays games, and the keys of a piano his father bought for him and his sister, in the hopes there would be at least one musician in the family. 

Sometimes a blank sheet of paper is all Ricardo needs to fill his time. He regularly imagines “big landscapes with lots of mountains and corn fields,” and commits them to paper. His cat Simba, and the sheep he helps his parents milk, also find their way into his illustrations. He does all this nearly always alone. 

“I text friends, videocall them, but they don’t always answer because they’re busy. That makes things harder. I can’t play ball, I don’t have friends to talk to. People almost never come over,” he says. 

These realities are not so distant from what Paula Cristina Martins, a researcher at the Institute of Childhood Studies, encounters every day, even while her focus is on children in urban environments, “locked up in their apartments, their parents driving them back and forth from school,” she points out. The only difference is that, for only children in the interior of the country, the borders isolating them are physical. 

But urban spaces are teeming with unseen borders. “At first glance, you might think these children were in more appropriate spaces, but we can’t only look at the physical environment. We also have to look at interactions. Sometimes these kids have every resource available, but they can’t take advantage of them. It’s like having a piano at home and not knowing how to play. A small tambourine might be more useful,” she notes. 

Ricardo has wondered what would become of Vinhas if no one was around to keep it going. This is also a central concern for Andreia, an unusual candidate for president of the village council. 

She left Vinhas as a young woman to go to college, and Bragança is still home to her and her young child. But at the age of thirty-three, she decided to finally tie the umbilical cord that binds her to this land, becoming its healer, in a way. The daughter of immigrants, Andreia confesses that “before sitting on the council, I wasn’t very present.” As she stepped into this role, she was met with a great challenge. 

There are things that need to be done and about which she feels a sense of urgency. “The health clinic shut down. We had one doctor who used to come here, and he stopped,” she explains. “The nearest health clinic is in Macedo de Cavaleiros. People have to pay for a taxi to get there. This is one of the difficulties I’ve raised with town hall.” 

Behind every other wall are the remains of houses in which people no longer live. “People mourn the fact that they’ve been abandoned, and sometimes speak of loneliness.”

This is why she’s brought mental healthcare to the village, though she never stops wondering how much longer there will be someone around to open the windows of that village to the world.  

“There used to be these old sidewalks with rocks that were unsteady and always dirty, and people would walk up and down them, dusting up the air. Now we have pavers and no one to walk on them. The villages are pretty but unpopulated,” she says. 

The effect is heart-wrenching. It’s as if the geographies of people could no longer line up with the geographies of places.