The mayors of disappearing villages: portraits from three countries

In Basilicata, the Auvergne and the Albanian Alps, the people in charge of places almost no one visits.

A data analysis published in April 2026 by CORRECTIV.Europe, drawing on new EU Joint Research Centre figures, found that half of all cities and municipalities across 32 European countries have fewer residents than they did in 1961, even as the continent's total population grew. One in five rural municipalities lost more than half its population over those six decades. Railway stations, schools, bank branches and bakeries have closed in their wake, reducing the quality of life for those who remain and, in doing so, accelerating the departure of whoever stayed.

The finding puts a number on something that mayors of small, remote communities have been living every day without needing a dataset to confirm it. A mandate to govern a place whose population is falling, sometimes by ten people a year, sometimes by a hundred, is a specific kind of political role. You are simultaneously administrator, last-resort service provider, cultural steward and, often, the public face of a question nobody in the capital wants to answer: what does a viable rural future actually look like?

This article visits three of those places: one in the heel of southern Italy, one on the French volcanic plateau, one in the mountains of northern Albania. Not to offer solutions, but to describe what the job looks like from the inside.

I. Basilicata, southern Italy: governing the bone

Basilicata is, by Istat's own accounting, the Italian region hardest hit by rural depopulation. Roughly 3,000 people leave the region each year. Out of 131 municipalities, 27 have fewer than 1,000 residents; some are projected to be uninhabited within a decade. The two provincial capitals, Potenza and Matera, account for 56 percent of the regional population. Everything else is what Ettore Bove, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Basilicata, has called "the bone": the disadvantaged inland areas that the contrast with developed coastal and urban zones can only make more pronounced over time.

Matera, European Capital of Culture in 2019, brought international attention and a surge in visitors. It also illustrated the limits of tourism as a regional lifeline. The spotlight fell almost entirely on the city, while villages an hour away in the hills continued to empty.

Irsina, a hilltop municipality in the province of Matera, offers a more complex picture. Its total population is below 5,000 and falls year on year. The first wave of emigration came in the 1960s, when agrarian reforms that redistributed land (seven hectares per family) proved insufficient to sustain families growing wheat. People headed north to Sassuolo, in Emilia-Romagna, where the ceramics industry was expanding. Today roughly 8,000 people with roots in Irsina live in Sassuolo. That is more than remain in Irsina itself. The two municipalities have been twinned since the 1980s.

Nicola Morea became mayor of Irsina in 2015, having spent a decade as a lawyer in Milan before returning. According to reporting by CORRECTIV/Cafebabel's Empty Europe project, he attributes part of the town's recent partial recovery to foreign retirees: pensioners from Britain and elsewhere who, drawn by affordable property prices and the proximity of Bari airport, chose to settle in the historic centre. "Infrastructure is being carefully restored and resources and investment are transforming Irsina into a little jewel of the south," he was reported saying. The doors in the old quarter now bear names that are not Italian.

**[INTERVIEW TO CONDUCT: Nicola Morea, Mayor of Irsina — on governing a municipality that is simultaneously losing young residents and attracting foreign retirees; on whether tourism and new arrivals constitute a demographic replacement or a genuine revival; on what the next decade looks like without a school-age population.]**

The state has tried several approaches. Italy's Piano Nazionale Borghi, funded under the PNRR recovery plan, allocated 1 billion euros in two tranches: 420 million euros for 21 pilot regeneration projects (one per region, each receiving 20 million euros), and 580 million euros for a broader wave of local projects. In Basilicata, Monticchio Bagni was selected as the pilot village for Line A. Line B drew roughly 1,800 applications from municipalities of up to 5,000 residents across the country. The Ministry of Culture announced the programme in 2022; results have been uneven. Access to the funding requires navigating bureaucratic complexity that small town halls, staffed by two or three people, often lack the capacity to manage.

The "one-euro house" schemes that generated international headlines are a separate, older mechanism. Some have worked, bringing buyers who spend money on restoration and stay for part of the year. Most observers note that a part-time foreign owner, however committed, is not the same as a family with children in the local school.

San Paolo Albanese, the smallest municipality in Basilicata, illustrates the cultural as well as the demographic stakes. Founded in the sixteenth century by Albanians fleeing Ottoman persecution, it is one of five Arbëreshë communities in the region. Its population stands at around 253; the average age is 54. Over the last decade it has lost roughly 100 residents, about ten per year, according to local tour guide Maria, as reported in the Empty Europe project. The primary school closed in 2011. Without it, children who do not speak Arbëreshë at home have no institutional route into the language. The community's Byzantine Greek rite Mass continues to fill the church on Sunday mornings, but the congregation is silver-haired.

**[INTERVIEW TO CONDUCT: Mayor of San Paolo Albanese — on the connection between demographic survival and linguistic survival; on whether the Arbëreshë cultural identity can be sustained at a population of 200 or below; on what the municipality has asked of the Italian state that it has not received.]**

II. The Auvergne, France: when the classroom closes

The Cantal, the most sparsely populated department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, had 146,000 inhabitants as of the most recent available INSEE data, a figure that has been declining continuously since the early twentieth century. Between 2011 and 2016, the department lost population at an average of 0.2 percent per year. Moderate on paper. Compounding across decades. The natural balance is deeply negative: deaths substantially outnumber births, and while in-migration from people seeking a slower life has grown slightly (the solde migratoire turned mildly positive), it has not been enough to compensate. The decline is sharpest in the isolated communes of the Massif du Cantal and the high plateaux of the Cézallier and Aubrac, the villages furthest from any urban influence. For these communes, the natural balance runs at roughly minus one percent per year.

The sociological texture of that decline is felt most immediately in public services. A village that loses its baker, its doctor and its primary school class in the same decade becomes structurally harder to live in for anyone with children or without a car. The school closure is often the proximate cause of the next wave of family departures.

In January 2024, the French government's France Ruralités programme launched its Villages d'avenir initiative, selecting communes of fewer than 3,500 inhabitants for personalised project support: building rehabilitation, mobility, water management, digital infrastructure. In the first year, 2,965 communes were enrolled nationwide; 400 more were added in 2025. In Cantal alone, 63 communes joined the initial wave; 35 in Haute-Loire.

**[INTERVIEW TO CONDUCT: Mayor of a Cantal commune enrolled in Villages d'avenir — preferably a commune that has recently lost a school class or a medical practice — on what the programme has actually delivered in its first 18 months; on what governing a municipality of 300 or 400 people requires in practice that no training prepares you for; on whether the France Ruralités approach addresses the structural problem or merely delays it.]**

The Auvergne also provides one of the sharpest examples of creative local response. In Brignon, a commune in Haute-Loire, the municipal government began selling building plots for one euro per square metre in 2017, specifically targeting young couples willing to build a primary residence. Over the following ten years, the village gained thirty residents and recorded seven births in 2024 alone, a meaningful number for a very small commune, according to reporting by Connexion France. The mechanism is simple and replicable. The limitation is that it works only where land is available and where the commune has sufficient administrative capacity to manage the process.

What the Auvergne case illustrates is the gap between national policy ambition and the human resource available at the municipal level. A mayor of a commune of 400 people is typically not a full-time public official. They are a farmer or a retired teacher or a local business owner who ran for office because no one else did. They handle planning decisions, infrastructure maintenance, EU grant applications and, increasingly, the emotional weight of being the last institutional representative of a place that statistics say is dying. The Villages d'avenir programme addresses this partly by pairing enrolled communes with project engineering support. Whether that support is sustained beyond the political cycle of the programme is the question mayors in the Massif Central are not yet able to answer.

III. The Albanian Alps: the other direction of pressure

Northern Albania presents the inverse problem, or what looks like it. Theth and Valbona, the two villages at the heart of the Alps of Albania National Park (established in 2022, amalgamating the former Theth and Valbona Valley national parks), have experienced an explosion of tourist interest over the last decade. Albania received 11.7 million international visitors in 2024, a 15 percent increase on 2023 and roughly double pre-pandemic levels. Mountain tourism, particularly the Valbona-to-Theth trail, is a growing share of that number. Theth's permanent population is estimated at around 300 to 370 people.

The villages' relationship with tourism is not a simple story of rescue. The underlying demographic dynamic is one of severe rural depopulation: Albania's rural population fell from 59 percent of the national total in 1998 to 39.7 percent by 2019, according to a 2019 analysis by the Albanian Network for Rural Development (ANRD). The mountainous north, Kukës county, which covers Valbona, is among the most severely affected regions. Emigration is not a choice for much of this population, the ANRD analysis notes, but "an unavoidable way out." Young people intending to leave their home region were more prevalent in Albania (66.7 percent) than in any other Western Balkan country surveyed in a regional study cited by the ANRD.

In this context, the arrival of tourist income has offered a partial lifeline. Families who remained have converted stone houses into guesthouses. The sound of construction became a feature of Theth's summer season: new accommodation, often built rapidly and on informal land arrangements.

In 2025, that construction became the focal point of a crisis. Albanian government authorities demolished tourist guesthouses in Theth, citing illegal construction in a protected national park area. According to reporting by albaniavisit.com, the demolitions directly affected twenty families who had invested their savings to build accommodation, leaving them facing financial ruin. Protests followed; the case became a national story about the collision between land law, park regulations, local livelihoods and the political management of tourism development.

**[INTERVIEW TO CONDUCT: Mayor of Theth commune (or the relevant administrative head of the Theth administrative unit, which falls within Shkodër municipality) — on how local families navigate park regulations while trying to build a viable economy; on what the 2025 demolitions meant for trust between the community and central government; on whether tourism, at current volumes, is experienced as relief or as a new form of pressure on a community that was already fragile.]**

The Kelmend region, further north, presents a version of the same tension without the international visibility. Its villages (Vermosh, Lepushë, Boge) sit in a narrow valley bordering Montenegro. The area is included in plans for expanded agro-tourism development; a "100 Villages" rural development programme announced by the Albanian Investment Corporation in recent years has cited Kelmend-area villages among its targets. Permanent population is thin and falling. The tourist season is short and weather-dependent. What a mayor of one of these communes governs, in practice, is a place that exists for much of the year as an administrative fiction: listed in the register, maintained in theory, inhabited by a handful of elderly residents and visited seasonally.

The contrast with Theth is instructive. Theth has tourists; it has income; it has young Albanians who chose to stay or return because there was an economic reason to do so. It also has contested land, regulatory conflict and the particular precarity of an economy built on guesthouse income from a hiking trail. Whether that constitutes a solution to depopulation, or merely a different set of problems, is a question the village's mayor is better placed to answer than any planner in Tirana.

What visiting well looks like

These three places do not need visitors who mistake them for museum pieces. They need visitors who understand that the businesses they spend money in and the rooms they sleep in are not atmospheric details. They are the economic case for a family staying another year.

In Basilicata, that means choosing the inland villages and not only Matera: Irsina, Guardia Perticara, Craco's inhabited lower town as well as its ruined upper one. In the Auvergne, it means extending a trip into the Cantal plateau instead of driving through it to reach somewhere more obvious. In the Albanian Alps, it means booking a family guesthouse in Theth or Valbona, asking what the hosts built and what it cost them, and understanding that the price you pay is not a bargain to be minimised but a transfer that matters.

None of these mayors asked for tourism as a solution to depopulation. Most of them would say it is a partial answer at best, and a destabilising one at worst if it arrives faster than the community can manage it. What they ask of national governments, of EU structural funds and of the sporadic attention of people who care about rural Europe is more straightforward than a tourism strategy: services, schools, connectivity, and the administrative support to access the funding that already exists on paper.

Visitors are not the answer. But they can be part of the conditions under which an answer becomes possible.

- [CORRECTIV.Europe — "Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago," Lilith Grull, Ada Homolova, Frida Thurm, 21 April 2026](https://correctiv.org/en/europe/2026/04/21/half-of-europes-towns-and-villages-have-fewer-residents-than-60-years-ago/) - [Eurostat — "Predominantly rural regions experience depopulation," January 2023](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20230117-2) - [Cafebabel Empty Europe — "Basilicata: the Italian villages resisting depopulation"](https://emptyeurope.cafebabel.com/basilicata-the-italian-villages-resisting-depopulation/) - [Pulitzer Center — "Will Paying People to Relocate Be Enough to Save Italy's Smallest, Most Isolated Villages?"](https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/will-paying-people-relocate-be-enough-save-italys-smallest-most-isolated-villages) - [Ministero della Cultura — Piano Nazionale Borghi (PNRR)](https://cultura.gov.it/pnrr-borghi) - [L'Espresso — "PNRR, più di un miliardo di euro per ripopolare i borghi italiani," April 2023](https://lespresso.it/c/attualita/2023/4/4/pnrr-piu-di-un-un-miliardo-di-euro-per-ripopolare-i-borghi-italiani/2870) - [INSEE Flash Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes no. 45 — "Cantal : le déclin démographique persiste malgré un regain d'attractivité," January 2019](https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3688658) - [Banque des Territoires — "Villages d'avenir : 400 nouvelles communes vont rejoindre le programme en 2025"](https://www.banquedesterritoires.fr/villages-davenir-400-nouvelles-communes-vont-rejoindre-le-programme-en-2025) - [Connexion France — "Discover How a French Commune Revitalised Its Population with €1 Land Sales"](https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/french-towns-selling-off-land-cheaply-benefit-from-population-growth/701853) - [IDM Albania — "A reflection on the rural exodus in Albania," Evelina Azizaj, December 2019](https://idmalbania.org/reflection-on-rural-exodus-albania/) - [Wikipedia — "Alps of Albania National Park"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alps_of_Albania_National_Park) - [albaniavisit.com — "Theth Demolitions 2025 — A Crisis of Tourism, Land, and Law," July 2025](https://albaniavisit.com/tourism-politics/theth-demolition-crisis-2025/) - [hotelagio.com — Albania Tourism Statistics (11.7 million visitors in 2024)](https://hotelagio.com/albania-tourism-statistics/)