Campillo de Ranas, the town in ‘empty Spain’ where love became an industry

Saturday, August 10. In Campillo de Ranas, a village of 60 inhabitants in the province of Guadalajara, English, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish are being spoken. There is a wedding at the Town Hall, where Diana Jiménez and Regina Valenzano are tying the knot. Neither of them is from the village. Diana, 34, was born in Madrid, and Regina, 30, in Bari, southern Italy. Both work in the international cooperation sector, were looking for a place to celebrate the ceremony, discovered Campillo on the internet and a video call from this beautiful village of black architecture, because of the slate used on the houses, convinced them.

“The wedding,” Regina explains, “had to be in Spain because it is not allowed in my country.” The Socialist Party (PSOE) mayor, Francisco Maroto, who has been in office for 24 years, has already lost count of the couples he has united in his municipality. Campillo made the international press for staging more weddings than it has inhabitants, and the village has become an example — imitated by others — of how to begin to fill the so-called España vacía, or “empty Spain.” In Campillo de Ranas, love is an industry that produces marriages and jobs. The village is also a privileged observatory of the evolution of the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, and the threats they still face. There is no room for complacency, warns the alderman.

It all started with a plan. When same-sex marriage was legalized in Spain in 2005, the then-Cardinal Archbishop Emeritus of Barcelona, Ricard Maria Carles, called on mayors to rebel: “Obey the law before your conscience takes you to Auschwitz. Because those who made Auschwitz were not criminals, but people who were forced, or who believed that they had to obey the laws of the Nazi government before their conscience,” he said.

Some mayors from the conservative Popular Party (PP) responded to the call. Lluís Caldentey, from Pontons (Barcelona), called homosexuals “idiots” and “deficient.” The PP opened a case against him, but did not expel him from the formation. “When several announced that they were going to be conscientious objectors and that they would not officiate at these weddings, I came out saying that I was also a mayor and that of course I was going to marry same-sex couples,” says Maroto.

The gesture put Campillo de Ranas on the map, and gay couples decided to get married there: “Weddings served as a window to the world and as an economic pillar. When we started, there was one rural house [for rent], today there are 19. This council lived off of livestock, goats, and now there are many more job opportunities. The 60 inhabitants on a day-to-day basis become 500 on weekends.” In the bar or in the Taller Tres craft shop — full of customers on the Saturday this newspaper visited Campillo — residents repeat the same mantra: “If it weren’t for weddings!” The shop is located in an old structure for housing livestock.

The benefit has not only been economic. “When we celebrated the first same-sex wedding, the Town Hall was full of people from the town because they were afraid that something would happen,” Maroto recalls. Spain at the time was only the third country in the EU to allow same-sex unions. Today, more than 70% of the European population lives in a territory where this right is recognized.

“At first, when the law was passed,” the mayor continues, “I said, jokingly, that Campillo was going to be filled with handsome guys, but what happened was that I married, mainly, people who had been waiting for many years to be able to regularize their situation. Today I no longer marry couples who have been together all their lives, but those who, like any other, after a while, decide to take the step.”

Diana and Regina met in the summer of 2019. “We met three times and then we started a long-distance relationship,” Regina explains. “When the pandemic started,” Diana adds, “I took the last plane before everything closed down and we spent the lockdown together, in a single bed with Regina’s roommates.” A Master’s degree in cohabitation.

When EL PAÍS visited the town in November 2011, shortly before general elections in Spain and six years after the law was passed, there was a spike in weddings — up to three in one day — due to fear that, if the PP won, it would repeal the law. In fact, that report was titled with a quote from one of the couples: “Let’s get married before [former prime minister] Mariano Rajoy gets to La Moncloa.”

The PP had even filed an appeal against the legislation in the Constitutional Court, which in 2012 ruled in favor of recognizing the right to same-sex marriage. In 2015, another Maroto, Javier, a former vice-secretary of the PP, married his partner and invited the entire leadership of the party to the wedding. Andrea Levy, who had also just joined the leadership of the conservative formation, recently explained the doubts about whether or not to attend that assailed the PP hierarchy: “The debate about Javier’s wedding has aged very badly because today it is completely out of date. At that moment, a tear occurred in the seams of a party that had not opened itself to younger generations in the leadership, and we realized that certain positions were unacceptable.”

In that laboratory, everything also became “normalized.” If between January and November 2011 — due to the fear that the PP would backtrack on the law — 30 of the 80 weddings held in the village were between people of the same sex, today, explains the mayor, the number is less than 6%. “But visibility,” he adds, “is still very important. Here there are young people who have come out without any problem, which 20 years ago was unthinkable because before, in the rural world, they would go to the big cities, while at home they continued to pretend.” When he was 16, Maroto spent 48 hours in detention at the General Directorate of Security in Madrid after being accused of being “a vagrant and a criminal” for being homosexual.

In Así estoy yo sin ti (1987), Joaquín Sabina sang: “Bitter as the exile’s wine, like a pensioner’s Sunday, like a civil wedding...” but the ceremony in the town shows that times have changed. In the plenary hall of the Town Hall, where much more difficult issues are usually addressed, such as the problems caused by drought, a rainbow flag hangs next to the portrait of Spain’s King Felipe VI.

Before reading the articles of law, Maroto explains how the environment has improved thanks to such weddings and thanks the couple for contributing to the visibility of the group. He explains that one of the countries where they showed the documentary Campillo sí, quiero, (Campillo, I do), directed by Andrés Fernández Rubio, was Italy, and that when they told him that they would never achieve equality in Regina’s home country because of the weight of religion, he replied that in Spain it also seemed impossible after 40 years of the Franco dictatorship and with the bishops demonstrating in the streets, but in the end, it came to pass. Regina cries, overcome. So does la nonna, her grandmother, who is happy to see her granddaughter happy.

The 121 guests of 10 different nationalities head to one of the bars in Campillo de Ranas before the wedding banquet. Maroto, a 60-year-old native of Madrid, returns to the house he occupied in the village more than four decades ago, when he worked at ICONA (the former Spanish Institute for the Conservation of Nature) and decided, with three other friends and their respective partners, to settle in empty Spain; at that time there were only six people living regularly in the village.

He is pleased with the compliments his village has received, but he knows that rights, like relationships, are not guaranteed to last forever and must be nurtured: “It pains me that the left has not placed more emphasis on education because now there are kids who are supporting the homophobic positions of the extreme right, or who at least do not oppose them.”

The 40dB monographic survey carried out for EL PAÍS last June revealed that one in two LGBTQ+ people had suffered some type of aggression in the last year and that, although the majority believed that Spain was a benchmark in the defense of the community, for a third of respondents it had gone “too far.” The most worrying data regarded males from Generation Z (aged 18 to 26): up to 26.8% confessed that they were uncomfortable seeing a homosexual couple, and 43.6% of them believed that there should be “a heterosexual pride day.”

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