Aug
9
Lured by white sandy beaches, all-night parties and top-notch cuisine, celebrities from around the world have been making the trek to Spanish hotspots such as Ibiza and Marbella all summer to see and be seen.
But across the country, another kind of celebrity has quietly been making the trek to this sleepy mountain village. Avión, a rain-soaked village 50 miles from the nearest beach, has earned a reputation across Spain for playing host to some of the world’s wealthiest people. Last week saw Carlos Slim, the world’s second richest person after Bill Gates, drop by for his second consecutive summer visit.
Arriving on his private jet and driving around in a Rolls-Royce, Slim is no ordinary visitor. But there’s nothing ordinary about this village of 2,400 residents in Galicia – from its gated mansions and homes that wouldn’t be out of place in an American suburb to the dozens of Mercedes and BMWs that line its streets.
While 50 years of urbanisation and the recent economic crisis have left more than 2,900 hamlets abandoned across Spain, Avión is a thriving Galician village, albeit one with just a handful of restaurants and half a dozen abandoned homes at its centre.
The reason for Avión’s curious prosperity, says its mayor, Antonio Montero, is emigration. The rugged mountainous terrain meant little could be grown here, he says. People started leaving at the end of the 19th century, heading to Mexico City or Madrid – anywhere there might be work. Generations went by, but the same reality persisted, making Avión a village devoid of working-age people.
But whether they ended up in Venezuela or Holland, the residents of Avión clung to their culture. They often socialised with and married other Galicians, they learned to play the gaita – the traditional bagpipe of the region – and they dined on Galician food at home. And if they could afford to, says Montero, they came to Avión for their holidays, building homes in the small village and solidifying an identity that lay somewhere between their new homes and their old one.
The tradition continues and the
population of Avión swells to more than double its normal size every summer. Many of those who come here today are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of residents who left long ago, committed to maintaining the physical bond their relatives broke with the village so many years before.
Montero, whose mother was from Avión, is the perfect example. He was born in Uruguay and bounced between Spain and Mexico for much of his life. “I would say about 80% of the population of this village has a similar story.”
It was this history that brought Carlos Slim to Avión last week. He came as the guest of Olegario Vázquez Raña, the son of Galician immigrants who made their fortune in Mexico after leaving the village in the 1920s.
Slim is just one of the many big names who have popped in for a visit in recent years – from former Mexican president Vicente Fox to Amancio Ortega, the founder of fashion powerhouse Inditex and its Zara stores.
The media attention showered on these visits often give the illusion that Avión is a village filled with rich immigrants, says Montero. “It’s true that a good part of our residents are very successful in their countries of residence, but there is also a big percentage that are middle class. We have a bit of everything here.”
The return of immigrants to their lands is nothing new in Galicia, says resident Isabel Gabián. “Galicians are all like that, not just in Avión. We’re very romantic in this sense,” she says. But other villages in the region traditionally had stronger agricultural or other industries, meaning that not everyone had to leave for jobs.
In Avión there was little other choice, she says. The higher proportion that left during the last century is today reflected in the many more who return to the village. She points to the village name, thought to have come from the nearby river Avia. But avión also means “aeroplane” in Spanish – a name that aptly sums up the village. “Without planes, there would be no Avión.”
Gabián’s family is no exception; She was born in Mexico after her family spent time in Brazil and Holland, eventually returning to Avión.
On Friday, Gabián was running around, putting the final touches to the village’s annual fiesta. As volunteers drove a truck full of papier-mache piñatas to the festival site, others got to work putting up an two-metre-wide Mexican flag, while a mariachi band warmed up beside them. This year marks the 10th year of the village’s Mexican fiesta, she explains. “We wanted to create a festival that represented this town and that paid homage to our many migrants in some way. Since a high percentage of Avión went to Mexico, we decided to have a Mexican fiesta.”
It’s a fitting tribute to a phenomenon that has become intertwined with this village. “It’s difficult to imagine Avión without migration. It’s like asking what would have happened if man never made it to the moon. Or if the light bulb had never been invented.”
For many successive generations, anyone who was capable left the village. If they had stayed, maybe they would have started businesses or created an industry in the village, she says. “We’ll never know because young labourers – those who had strong hands and could work – were the ones that left.”
The fact that the village has one of one of the highest per-capita incomes rankings in the country – emphasised by the presence of banks outnumbering restaurants on the main drag – has attracted Galician documentary film-maker María Hervera to Avión. Immigration has always been commonplace in the region, she says. “The idea of absence has left a profound mark on Galician character.”
Avión was the perfect base to explore the concept, she says, as “the theme of migration is so exaggerated here. The immigrants made a lot of money, particularly in Mexico, and in achieving this wealth, they keep coming to Avión.”
Surrounded by plush mansions whose residents zoom around in luxury cars, it’s easy to buy into the idea that Avión is a place that got lucky, whose residents managed find wealth in new worlds without losing their culture and connection with home, she says.
Hervera and her crew spent six weeks in the village, delving into the stories behind the glaring wealth for their documentary, Avión, The Absent Village. “When you’re looking at these people who have returned and achieved their so-called dream, it’s incredible to hear how much they’ve sacrificed along the way to achieve that.”
The film gave Hervera an inside glimpse of a community where immigration has left its mark perhaps more strongly than anywhere else in the world. “It’s a very strange place. If you landed there without knowing where you were, you would have few clues to go by. You walk along the streets and you hear all sorts of accents. You see flags of Panama, United States, Mexico hanging from balconies. It’s an amalgam of things. In the supermarket there is an entire section dedicated to Mexican food.
“It’s a place that has been completely transformed by migration. Physically and in the character of the people.”
As Hervera and her crew were filming, parallels started to emerge between the history of Avión and the current situation in Spain. Thousands of Spaniards, particularly young people, frustrated by the lack of jobs in Spain, are going abroad in search of opportunities. Some now wonder whether Avión is not an anomaly, but rather a glimpse of what lie ahead for other villages in Spain when these migrants return.
The different waves of immigration are hard to compare, says Hervera. “Many of those who left Avión didn’t know how to read or had little schooling. Now those going abroad have university studies.”
Even so, she doubts that those leaving today would have the same opportunities as those who left generations ago. “It was a different time. For example, those who went to Mexico started businesses that didn’t exist at the time there.”
The lessons she takes from Avión don’t bode well for those in Spain who find themselves in the same situation today. “It’s a disgrace for any village to have their residents forced to leave because there are no opportunities. You can justify it by pointing to individual success stories – but they lost so many things along the way.”
Perhaps comfort lies in the fact that today Avión has become one of the rare villages in Spain where few feel forced to go abroad to make a living. The change is drastic, says Gabián, and a poignant lesson to those determined to keep out the African migrants attempting to jump the fences at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
“They’re desperate to leave and we’re closing the doors. But back in the day, the world opened their doors to us. We forget that Europeans emigrated en masse at one time.”
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