Village Life vs. City Life in Spain

|VILLAGE LIFE VS CITY LIFE IN SPAIN |
|In the past Spain was a country mainly dedicated to agriculture for its livelyhood. Villages were full of families with |
|many children, all and I mean all of them worked on the land. Families were big, five children upwards and although |
|nearly all the villages had a village school, education was not high up in the agenda. Most offspring followed in their |
|fathers footsteps. |
|Cities were for "cultured people" business men, engineers, architects and so on. These people usually had more money than|
|villagers and often went to university. |
|Then, around the 60's there was a social change, a vast number of villagers left their homes in search of a better life |
|in the cities. So slowly but surely villages were emptied of "young people" in fact there is a good number of "ghost |
|villages up and down Spain". |
|The villagers who moved to the city found that they were actually better off. Spain's economy was growing and there were |
|plenty jobs available. These people had fixed working hours, (unlike in the village where work was from dawn till dusk) |
|they also had a month's holiday which was paid for by the company, (something which they never had in the village) their |
|children could go to school instead of working the land. There were all the ammenities near at hand, all kinds of |
|entertainment and so on....Indeed, they felt they were better off! |
|Nowadays things have changed yet again. Villages are filling up once again but not with farmers, in fact, townsfolk are |
|trying to escape the stress of city life by going back to nature. These citizens are buying up old, deteriorated village |
|houses and doing them up, so that at weekends they can get away from the hustle and bustle of the boring daily routine in|
|the city. Other people have sold up their belongings and gone to live in the village, they make a living by converting |
|large old houses into "village inns" where city folk who can't afford a house of their own can escape that stress. |
|Life in the village is now peaceful for most. Of course there are still farmers in villages, but their life today is much|
|better than in the past as they have all kinds of machines and gadgets to make their work easier. I wonder what kind of |
|changes there will be in the future. Maybe people will all decide to live in peace and quiet in villages and the cities |
|will become empty! |
|If I had the chance to work from home, I would certainly choose to live in a village although I would need to be fairly |
|near a big city so that I had the best of both worlds! |