My father is from one of those hamlets. It has roughly ~150 "houses", and each house has farming terrains around, except in some "clusters" near main roads and crossroads.
It also had A LOT of farming area and cows population probably wins 10to1 to humans, if not more, as it only has around 500 people.
So what would fit in 1 city square, here occupies ~20 square kilometers.
I used to spend half my summer there as a kid and it was a massive difference to my other side of the family origins, which is a small town in Ávila where all the houses are clustered together, and the farming areas are in the "outside" of the town.
It is a relatively well known thing in Spain, that in "the north", there are tons of semi-dispersed houses that forms tons of very dispersed "towns", vs the rest of the country where small towns follow the more traditional aggregation near the town square.
My stepfather is from a similar area in County Durham in the UK. His hamlet has ~100 people, the one a mile away has slightly more, etc. The whole area is dotted with tiny hamlets. I didn’t realize that was considered unusual.
So it sounds like small farms have survived better there than elsewhere. Is there a policy reason for that? How do they compete with economies of scale?
There are massive farms too, although more like big livestock farms rather than plantation style because terrain are mainly mountains and forests, but it's still very common for families to grow food for themselves and have some animals for food, but not 100% self-sufficient.
The people I know either work on something else and they also have a family farm, or have 100+cows + huge plantations, and that's their livelihood. So, no, I don't think small farms compete, they simply "still exists" as an extra.
When I was a kid, I would go fishing with my dad, bring back a sack of 50+ fishes and go around the town in my bicycle giving some fishes to extended family (4th cousins and the like), neighbours and family friends, and I would always come back with homegrown potatoes, eggs, milk, and homemade "empanada" or sweets. Kinda miss those times, haha.
One of the reasons is cultural. In Galicia the norm was that inheritance was parted equally between all sons (maybe children, I'm not an expert and may have gotten to something wrong) so farms tended to get smaller and smaller until falling below subsistence level and slowly consolidate again through mergers, buy outs or whatever other system. That's also one of the reasons for the Galician diaspora, since the system tends to expel people who inherit a plot that isn't enough to survive. My grandparents were among that diaspora, by the way.
In other regions of Spain traditional inheritance rules were different and tended to favor one of the sons. This allows for relatively bigger plots more tied to stable households that cluster together surrounded by fields instead of lots of small plots with households splitting each generation and building houses near the fields to avoid long daily trips. Those left without land also moved in search of opportunities, but geography and economic factors meant that they probably will find them in a relatively big town nearby and not, say, in the Canary Islands or South America.
At least that is my rough understanding of it, again, not an expert, so maybe there are other factors to consider.
My guess is it would be pretty similar, naturally.
Something similar you can see with existing maps, is the way município size changes from north to south - lots of small municípios in the north, larger ones in the south - and I read somewhere that this goes back to moorish influence on settlement patterns in the south.
And for anyone still wondering, it's the 2nd level territorial division. The country is divided into districts, the districts are divided into municípios, the municípios are divided into freguesias usually translated as "parish." This system accounts for every square meter, there's no such thing as "unincorporated."
Sansenxo is a very popular holyday town that goes from a population of 18k people to 100k in Summer.
The municipality is formed by the hamlets of Adigna, Bordones, Dorrón, Nantes, Noalla, Padriñán, and Villalonga.
So, albeit having a population of 18k, Sansenxo could be represented as 7 population centres in the map.
And it might actually count as 9 in the map, as it has two actual population centres (Sansenxo and Portonovo) inside the hamlets of Padriñan and Adigna respectively.
Multiply all of this for every municipality in Galicia, and you have this map.
That's why a lot of people are from Monforte (for example), but not really.
My father grew in a hamlet which now has 3 or 4 people all year. There are more houses than people. And in a 5 min walk radius there are 4 or 5 hamlets.
As a personal project, I'm creating artistic maps from geographic data. For this "Stardust" version of Spain, I plotted every single populated place from OpenStreetMap for the mainland and the Balearic Islands.
I initially thought the bright cluster in the northwest was a bug in my code. But after some research, I was amazed to find it's a real, well-documented phenomenon known as "dispersed settlement," unique to Galicia (where almost half of all of Spain's populated entities are located).
I don’t want to generalise, but I’m from Northern Spain and here’s my experience. In Asturias/Galicia, you have a few houses, then you keep going on the same road and 1km later you have another few houses, and so on. Each small cluster of houses is considered a different village (you would call them hamlets in English). It wouldn’t make sense to “group” several of those clusters into the same “village”, because they’re different population centers (of course, there are higher administrative groupings). When you go to the flat lands in the middle of Spain (both Castillas, Extremadura, etc), you mostly have a bigger village (200-500 houses and a church), then NOTHING but wheat fields for 20km, then another bigger village. I believe that’s what you’re seeing in this map.
It probably has to do with the climate and orography. I’m guessing that on Castilla, traditionally, you could only build a settlement wherever there’s a river or a subterranean water reservoir, whereas in the North you can just build wherever, but the mountains limit how bit the settlements can realistically be.
It sounds similar to the UK, I lived in a little village called Llwyngwril, 2 miles south is a hamlet called Llangelynin, it only has a handful of houses, 2 miles north is Friog, then move about half a mile from that there's Fairbourne.
I was thinking that too! In the parts of regional Australia a go through, towns tend to be ~100km apart. I was told that that was due to towns being one day's travel apart via horse.
Fairbourne is a pretty recent settlement built around the 1900s. It was built after a new railway was planned along the Welsh coast as a summer beach destination, so I imagine Fairbourne as a name was meant to appeal to Victorian holiday-goers. Friog etc take their names from existing settlements or farmsteads.
There's a theory (long forgot the source, sorry) explaining the first cities in Mesopotamia: The receding Arabian sea briefly left a lush paradise of marshy arable land, allowing populations to boom, but continued to recede, drying out the land. People congregated into large cities for protection and out of desperation, and the large cities organized civil projects like irrigation canals.
I wonder if there's a similar economic incentive for centralized towns in Spain. In times of conflict, towns would be built near castles for protection, and large populations could protect each other better than smaller scattered towns. But we're several centuries removed from a need for castles... Could it be the nature of the industries, more mechanized agriculture in flatter lands? Or maybe it is water like comment above.
They are rural areas where the population is very spread out, not neighbourhoods of cities.
Historically the rural north is a land of many land owners who hold small portions of land, as opposed to the south where a few owners hold vast swathes of land. The population is very spread out in part because of this.
The local council in rural areas will cover several of those villages, and that municipal entity will have a name (usually the name of the largest place in the area). This may be similar to what France does.
Flemish part in Belgium got it too, very little amount of big cities (Gent and Antwerpen really) but settlements of 10k-20k are pretty much throughout the country, like literally every 5km you’ll find a small town.
Essentially. I live in another part of Spain but my family is from Galicia (and I have travelled all over the country). Rural parts of Spain may have a small town of a few hundred (or a few thousands) of people, and until you reach the next town, you have several kilometres of nothing, only empty fields or forest.
But in Galicia, you truly have houses EVERYWHERE. This is not an understatement. Not because you have a lot of people, but simply because they are scattered all over the place. It’s like a endless sprawl of tiny villages with like 10 houses, so officially, there are a lot more settlements than anywhere else in the country.
It's that Asturias and Galicia are quite hilly, yet wet enough to be worth having agriculture (at least back in the day), so you ended up with a lot of very small settlements, as working a field going up and down a large hill was just a PITA, so instead you had lots of small settlements.
The rain patterns also help, because itwas trivial to get water compared to further south. It's almost easier to get a working well than to dig a dry hole. I have a house in one of the mountains with its own spring: You don't have to connect to municipal water if you don't want to.
This can also be seen, for instance, in the Oviedo - Gijon - Aviles triangle. Three cities over 100k which in most of the world would just quickly grow to be one city: 30km away from each other. But go look at google maps and the orography.
Knowing a bit the area I guess he means that it has many small (as in 2-3 houses) villages. When you are driving in Galicia you enter a village and a few meters after you see the crossed sign leaving the village
Places like the pic here - these are 3 separate hamlets/named settlements. If you look at the distance scale, they are extremely close, a literal 5 minute or less walk from each other. And if you go into maps yourself and check the street view, you'll get a very good idea of just how close these are.
It seems that this area keeps these clusters of buildings separate instead of them being one entity
Edit: attached pic as a separate comment below since it won't show up attached to this post.
In the context of the data I'm using, a "populated entity" or "populated place" can be anything from a major city like Madrid to a tiny village, a hamlet, or even a named isolated dwelling in the countryside.
It is not that Galicia is somehow unique in this, it's that it is the only region where the rural, traditional way of life has survived. When I was a kid we still had teeny tiny villages, but in the last 40 years everyone died or moved away.
Driving through the Croatia inland countryside the people have disappeared but the 50km speed sign hasn't. There'd by a speed limit, an abandoned house or barn, maybe a place name, then back to open road.
Can you link to some of the sources you found about this? And is there some clear way to quantify this that shows it’s genuinely about actual settlement patterns and not just an artefact of different bureaucratic choices for ”splitting” vs ”lumping” settlements in their official designations?
For example, this article on Galician rural development mentions that half of Spain's populated entities are in Galicia: link. We also have a user from Galicia in this very thread who confirmed this is a real, on-the-ground reality due to the region's history.
You're right to be skeptical, but the data source here is key. I used OpenStreetMap, which aims to map physically distinct places, not just official bureaucratic lists. The "splitting" in Galicia's official designations is a direct reflection of its real-world settlement pattern of thousands of tiny, scattered hamlets.
So, it's genuinely a real settlement pattern, which the bureaucracy then mirrors.
It's a thing. You can even see it in google maps, just compare a rural area in Castilla or Andalucía with a rural are in Galicia and it's very obvious to the naked eye.
It's real and well known as OP says. There are many small villages/hamlets in Galicia, but also most of Asturias (both are autonomous regions similar to counties), and the Bierzo in Leon (a province). There's an ongoing migration from rural areas to bigger towns and cities though, and the most remote villages are getting abandoned (some already are) or only elderly people live there, so it's a matter of time.
The villages belong to a town or city that has the town hall with a major and their counsellors. Some villages near cities grew more than the towns they belong to and are now more populated than them.
The INE (Spanish Statistics institute) holds information about the population in each :
This is because in Asturias and Galicia villages and towns are a lot more sprawl that in other parts of Spain and there are like small groups of houses everywhere, all with a different name vs other parts of Spain are more like a town or village is a bigger group of houses centered around a plaza or a church. It's more "random" in Galicia and Asturias. The local administration reflects this too, in Asturias and Galicia there's a local entity that doesn't exist anywhere else in Spain, the "parish" (parroquia), which is like a "village" but it is made up from different hamlets (lugares). It is very obvious when you've been to those places vs other parts of Spain.
The reason for this development is mainly terrain and the traditional activities. Livestock was the dominant activity of everyone in these regions, due to bad terrain for farming, and each house or group of houses had a large grazing area around them to keep their animals.
Galicia has been populated throughout its territory for thousands of years; dating back to the Iron Age, you can find thousands of hill forts throughout our land. You can also search for the number of churches. In Galicia, almost every stone has a name. At Galicianomeada.xunta.gal, there's a project to compile our exceptional wealth of toponyms. Most of the land belongs to the inhabitants (minifundismo=smallholdings); most of the land is owned jointly(mancomun)
Thank you so much for sharing this incredible local knowledge. This is the "ground truth" that a data visualization can only hint at. You've perfectly explained the 'why' behind the data. I'm so grateful for you taking the time to write this! :)
Can vouch… visited a friend who bought a farm house in a hamlet in southern Galicia where he is the sole permanent inhabitant. There are of course other hamlets, a village, and a small town center a few minutes drive away, but in his hamlet, he’s the only one, aside from a family that spends there summers there in a nearby house.
It's a fantastic concept, but probably a whole new project in itself! For now, I'm focused on perfecting the 2D versions, but I'm definitely saving this idea for the future. Thanks for the awesome suggestion!
You might want to scale the dot size with the associated population in some way; not quite linear but just to avoid that people will think the northwest is more populated. The northwest would have many points of the smallest size, while Madrid in the middle would be clearly bigger.
great point! It's a deliberate choice: this map tells the story of settlement density, not population size. A population-scaled map would be a fascinating, but completely different, story.
Yes — I’m pretty sure the NW–SE line along the top of the letters is the Ebro, a big river making a habitable valley in an otherwise large arid/barren area, while the stems of the letters are its major tributaries from the SW. If I’m not mistaken, Zaragoza is the upper corner of the ‘R’, and the top of the ‘T’ is Alagón.
That seems exactly right, heres a crude overlay of the OP on a map of spain with the Ebro highlighted. You can see the villages follow the tributaries too.
In galicia we call it dispersion poblacional. If you travel by road you will constantly see little groups of houses, not even a hamlet by the road.
Edit: also the territory is divided in ( from. Bigger o smaller)
Concello ( municipalities )
Parroquia ( parish, in the old days it was the territory covered by a church)
Lugar ( place, just a group of houses )
So my father's municipalitiy which was Carral ( 6k inhabitants) is divided in 8 parroquias . The one where he was born ( san Vicente de vigo ) has around 450 inhabitants and it is further divided into 13 lugares. Ranging from 90 to 4 inhabitants.
Yes, no. Each dot is a unique place someone could say they live, e.g. 'Madrid' is one dot. This shows that people in the darker region live in a lot of tiny hamlets, instead of larger towns or even cities. So this does not show population density, but rather how spread people are.
The area around Madrid is light because if you take a random pair of people, they likely live in the same city (Madrid); the area northwest is dark because if you take a random pair of people, they almost certainly live in different hamlets.
that is quite interesting, don't know much about spain but i'm guessing it's more rural in the north west hence smaller places? would be curious how this looks in other countries
It's not just rural, the people somehow live in tiny 20-house settlements where the other rural parts of Spain still gather into regular rural towns. As per OP's comment, this is known as 'dispersed settlement'.
Yes, this is us. There are over 30,000 "núcleos de población", about half of Spain's. Sometimes is just one isolated house (Hamlet = lugar/aldea), and it has a name, and the house there and the family are known by a specific name or surname. That lugar belongs to a parish in a bigger aldea, where they own a grave with the name of the house.
In local news it is common to have pieces about the last inhabitant of the hamlet, and how they refuse to move anywhere even if they have family willing to take them in.
Yeah, I wish posts here labeled their visualizations better. At the minimum include a technical definition of what "a dot" is. While the plot looks nice, and reveals some clustering, this is poor visual communication
I'm a bit confused, seems like there's areas in the middle of Madrid that are blank on this map? Did you just mark Madrid as one dot? If so, I understand that each settlement equals one dot, but the existence of a major city like Madrid is obviously going to prevent any other settlements from propping up within it's preexisting boundaries, so it seems a little misleading to not acknowledge that some of those blank bits are in fact urban areas, as if the political entity that is Madrid didn't exist, each neighbourhood could well have been considered it's own settlement.
If I misunderstood then I take it back, cool map either way.
Yes, he is treating Madrid as a single point, and every 20-house hamlet as another single point. The interesting fact is then that people in that part North-West live in tiny hamlets, while in most of the country people gather into larger towns and cities.
Yeah I see it's just that Valencia looks more populated than Madrid here just because Valencia has a lot more suburbs that aren't part of the city proper, which is kind of an arbitrary difference when we're studying demographics. I feel like this trend could still have been conveyed while making sure that urban areas in major cities aren't left blank. Galicia would still be noticeably more filled in, it would just make the map a little less misleading.
To clarify what I mean a bit more, Paris and London have similar sized populations, but since London is a single political entity (or two if you count the City of London), it would only be one or two dots on a map like this.
Meanwhile the 'city proper' limits of Paris contain only 2 million people, with about ten million spread about in politically distinct, communes, so this map would show loads of dots. Even though they are all de facto parts of the same city, because of the way France governs it's land, it would show far more dots than London would.
the municipality of Madrid is represented by a single dot, yes. The blank space around it is indeed the rest of its vast urban and suburban area, which doesn't contain other officially named "populated places" in the dataset
A map like this is a visualization of politically defined populated places (communes, municipalities, etc.) as they exist in OSM dataset, not necessarily a map of urban agglomerations
This is a deliberate artistic and methodological choice. The trade-off is exactly what you described: a bureaucratically "lumped" city like London will look fundamentally different from a "split" urban area like paris
however the upside of using this specific "data lens" is that it reveals fascinating real-world patterns that would be invisible otherwise - like the dispersed settlement phenomenon in Galicia, which is a direct result of this same "splitting" logic
So you're right, it's not a perfect representation of urban density, but rather an honest visualization of one specific, official way of looking at a country's structure.
Anyway, thank you for such a thoughtful and high-level question
Fair points. I still think the trend you're trying to show would have still been visible even if all urban areas were fully filled in, but I imagine it would also be a lot more difficult to accurately create a map like that.
Thanks for the informative response, and I do still think it's a very insightful map that shows what would otherwise be a lot less visible on normal population density maps. Good job :)
Yes, the Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla are all part of Spain. This map just focuses on the mainland and Balearics for a clearer view of the settlement patterns.
Thanks, I had the same question! So analogous (I think*) to the US referring to the "continental US" (excludes Hawaii) and "contiguous states" (also excludes Alaska)
NB, I'm Canadian, this is just my assumption re the US terms.
From what I've read, the "dispersed settlement" phenomenon is very characteristic of Galicia specifically, due to its unique history of land ownership and inheritance laws (the 'minifundio' system). So my hypothesis is that Northern Portugal might show a similar, but probably less intense, pattern, while the rest of the country will be quite different.
It's definitely one of the next maps I'm planning to generate to test this theory :)
Minifúndio and the dispersed settlements are very present in Portugal but mostly north of the tegus
Galicia, Northern and central Portugal and a bit of the Asturias region kind of match the Suebi kingdom. Not sure if it's related or a coincidence. Maybe you could look that up? But it probably is related the Reconquista and medieval settlements . Portugal and Galicia share the same language origin (galaico-portugues) and the same customs and settlement patterns
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yes, in northern Portugal this also happens, I've heard it was due to it being mountainous and more populated than the south, so during medieval times the lots of the land became really subdivided and small making the houses a lot closer together, compared to the south which is mostly large open fields with much bigger lots controlled by fewer people.
I am also curious about the results when comes to Portugal, and I believe the North will be very similar to Galiza, particularly the region of Minho. I bet that to a certain degree Minho will be an extension of it. Congrats and keep it up!
I am less familiar with the Mihno but it’s definitely the case in Tras os Montes where my husband is from. They have the word « galegos » for this region of Portugal / Spain.
However it kind of applies to most European countries that are not Spain or Turkey if memory serves. Spain's settlement pattern is a massive outlier in Europe. Spain also has the most densely populated cities in the EU and barely any sprawl (having very dense cities applies also to Galicia btw). Portugal is very different from most of Spain but would resemble Galicia the most.
I doubt it reflects population density, people in Galicia probably just have a lower threshold for what counts as a populated place, like town or village
That’s what the Camino de Santiago is for, the whole region is gorgeous and because of the pilgrimage routes that lead there, there’s a bunch of super well developed trails and paths.
I mean it was just Galicia; Just meant the rest of Northern Spain was quite cool.
The best, hmmm... I honestly gotta give it to Norway.
The Italian Alps would win if it wasn't because of the shit traffic, once again; bikepacking and traffic just, just doesn't go well.
The Swiss Alps was nice because the traffic situation was so much better but it was just an unaffordable experience, just too expensive to be enjoyable.
You may wonder how I give Norway the prize when it's also expensive, well, Norway is much cheaper than Switzerland, and cheaper than people like to imagine due to wilderness huts and freedom to roam; it's expensive for traveling by car, I took many ferries and boats for free and the cheapest place to sleep was 10 euro and was utterly giant (a bit ridiculous how big it was), it was not accessible by car at all; it is still Norway nevertheless so not the cheapest either.
The cheapest was Poland and Slovakia, they are cool if you like flat and farms and the casual forest; not my cup of tea.
Finland is gravel heaven but it is also forest infinite, like it sometimes feels you are in the same place for days.
I'd want to try gravel in the Alps nevertheless, maybe I can get away from the dreaded traffic.
Western China is a lot like that. The mountains are functionally impassable, so you have little communities separated by only a few miles but with 5k meter ridges or fast-flowing mountain rivers between them.
Fast forward a few thousand years to today and theyre completely distinct from each other, not just politically but culturally and linguistically, too.
The blank spaces where there are no dots are often impassable mountains (like the Pyrenees) or major river valleys. The populated places are forced to cluster in the habitable lowlands between them, which creates those strange, linear, letter-like patterns.
I thought there’s likely a natural explanation, but had to ask because damn if they don’t look like the Romans settled people in a way to spell something!
I wonder if there are any historical reasons why there are so many separate/unique points for data collection for these hamlets. Less of a demographic phenomenon unless this is also representing population density, and more of an administrative phenomenon.
Several users from Galicia in this thread have confirmed it perfectly. They've described it as a pattern of "dispersión poblacional" (dispersed settlement) caused by a history of agriculture, difficult terrain, and unique land-ownership traditions.
the administrative map is really just a reflection of this reality on the ground - a centuries-old pattern of thousands of tiny, physically scattered hamlets. So it's not an artificial choice, but a visualization of a real historical settlement pattern.
When I was a kid the first time we left Galicia in a trip to Madrid, we went through Castilla Leon. I was legit in awe at how there were no houses on the road. It felt like going to Mars for 9 year old me. In Galicia we are used to see a house or a town or village every km or 2. Then you go outside of here and see 20 or 30km of road with nothing but fields.
Define "populated place". Is this to say there are lots and lots of officially recognized municipalities in Galicia, and fewer elsewhere? If so, that says nothing particularly profound. For comparison, my county has 19 incorporated municipalities, while Brooklyn county, NY has over 30 times the population but not even one complete city.
It would be very interesting to check whether the Galician pattern continues southward to Portugal. Historically, the two regions have a lot in common (even the language was originally the same).
If you would have done the entire peninsular you would have probably seen a similar pattern along the Portuguese coast That geographic area is just super nice. Feels like spring all year round. Also great Food and great people.
Galicia has rainy weather and a better environment for farms. The rural countryside is better able to sustain a population. It also has easy access to the sea
Not really, tho. There is no bigger population in Galicia than in other parts of Spain, but the rural population is more spread out there are more sources of water available. Many of these points in rural Galicia represent hamlets of a few people, while in the rural south many of those points are agro-cities of tens of thousands of people.
Isn’t Spain more or less a union of previously independent states and doesn’t this map just show the remains of that period where every state had their own laws about what counted as a settlement and what doesn’t?
When somebody from the south of Spain comes to the north west they are in awe about the amount of tiny villages and their proximity. It's not about how towns are considered, it's actually a different distribution system. You can't drive 20km without finding a town/village in Galicia, but that's normal in other regions of Spain.
Not at all. Northwest Spain has rainy, hilly terrain, so it makes perfect sense to use the land by having tiny population centers that work a piece of land that is a bother to reach from elsewhere. You don't have to irrigate, and getting drinkable water is a matter of digging a hole, so there's a ton of tiny settlements, and the largest ones cannot get that big, again due to nasty orography.
You go south of those mountains, and you get big, flat, dry plains, where you rely on rivers to get water. Unsurprisingly, the development pattern is different. with fewer settlements that are significantly bigger.
And as for your idea of it being a union of independent states... if you looked at historical maps, and at that distribution, you'd see that old borders don't line up at all. Yet it lines up great when you look at the satellite pictures and a topographic map.
This is Open Street Map (OSM), and the leading contributor to OSM in Iberia lives in north west Spain. The map is not showing density of settlements, but how busy one of the OSM editors is. Is it were the autism is located.
There is definitely some difference with settlement pattern in Galicia being closer to Portugal than the rest of Spain but your OSM data is also off. I mean you can barely see Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or any major cities outside of Galicia for that matter.
Well, my source is essentially what Spain's national statistics reports to Eurostat. It should be the most accurate you can find barring even more granual data from Spain's statistics office that you likely have to pay for if it is accesible. Say Germany and Denmark have hectar population grids. The Eurostat grid is an established European standard to aggregate certain kinds of statistical data over time. It's been established around 20 years ago.
It's also not distinct cities but populated km² squares. However the two should allign closely. What was your data source?
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u/Aggravating-Map-8962 13h ago
I love it, I'm actually from Galicia.
Due to agriculture and difficult terrain each "town" is composed of several hamlets or communities.
It also extends to Asturias and north of Portugal.