I am a strong advocate of ICT and digital tools, convinced of their transformative power. Throughout my professional career at Telefónica, I have witnessed unstoppable technological evolution: we started with copper, moved on to mobile telephony—first analog, then digital—and transitioned from modems to routers, from ADSL to fiber optics and 5G, and from antenna television to connected platforms. Each step was a milestone. Each advance has been a silent revolution that has changed the way we live, communicate, and understand the world.
Human beings are constantly evolving. We are living through a change of era: we have entered the “virtucene,” a time in which many of our activities have moved from the physical to the virtual world. And in this transition, technology and connectivity are not a luxury, but a necessity. Without them, we are lost.
If I dare to dream, the next big leap should be teleportation. When that moment arrives, we will experience another great revolution, as momentous as the arrival of television, the telephone, the internet, and artificial intelligence were in their day.
Technology transforms our everyday reality: how we relate to each other, how we work, how we inhabit the world. Today, life does not only happen in person, but also in the digital world. We live alongside digital immigrants and natives, and much of today’s logic would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.
The territory is not immune to this transformation either. A truly developed country is one that structures its territory in an equitable manner, preventing the existence of areas relegated to a second-class status in terms of opportunities. Spain, like other countries in its region, faces a major challenge: demographics. While some areas—large cities, coasts, and islands—are oversaturated, other regions are emptying out, becoming depopulated, and dying. And with them, services, infrastructure, and, above all, life are lost.
Rural depopulation is not just a social or economic issue: it is also ecological and cultural. The loss of inhabitants leads to the abandonment of the territory and less protection for our forests, rivers, land, and our natural and cultural heritage. For this reason, the demographic challenge has become a real problem for the state. In fact, the Spanish government has launched 130 measures to address the Demographic Challenge, some of which are already underway.
But the first step must be taken by us. We must be the first to commit to rural areas, to discover—and rediscover—their potential. Even today, there is still a negative stigma associated with villages. We must break with this narrative. We need to make rural life fashionable and banish the pejorative use of terms such as “village” or “villager.”
Other countries have already done so. In the United Kingdom, the “countryside” is desirable; in France, “la campagne” is synonymous with quality, authenticity, connection to the land and tradition.
We can do it too. We just need to believe it. We need to show real examples of initiatives that work and breathe life into rural areas. Projects that take advantage of local resources and combine tradition with innovation, heritage with digitalization, the countryside with information highways.
It is essential to invest in education, to show children that there is a future in rural areas. We must support those who have ideas and the courage to carry them out. We must promote a positive vision of rural areas from both the public and private sectors, promoting positive marketing that dignifies and enhances the prestige of our villages.
Only in this way will we achieve a living, vibrant rural environment, capable of beating strongly and, in balance with urban areas, generating dynamism and progress for the country as a whole.
It is about keeping the doors of our villages open. Even opening new ones. We must also take advantage of the opportunities offered by digitization in rural areas to promote initiatives that are locally based but have a reach beyond the place where they originate and are managed. In this sense, technology has a lot to say and becomes a fundamental tool.
Projects such as AlmaNatura Lab in Andalusia, El Hueco in Soria, Biko in Kuartango Lab, DespertadoresRurales.org and Apadrinaunolivo.org in Teruel, and the network of Territorial Innovation Centers are inspiring examples of what is possible when there is vision, commitment, and action, and at the same time they are driving forces behind this rural awakening.
Will you join the challenge to make villages cool?
“In villages, there is connection. And not just the internet.”
