Driving north-east out of Madrid on the A2 motorway, the industrial sprawl seemed as never-ending as the roaring river of traffic. The change, when it came, was sudden and complete. After Peñarrubia the heavy traffic vanished, and with it the industrial estates and dull dormitory towns. We were now in Guadalajara, a province of Castilla-La Mancha which, with an average of just five inhabitants per square kilometre, has been described as “the largest demographic desert in Europe”.
The Spanish call places like this la España vaciada. The word for “empty” is vacío, but vaciada means “emptied”, as if there were something deliberate about the way the fabric of rural Spanish society has been worn threadbare by depopulation and underdevelopment.
Beyond the small town of Tamajón, gateway to the wild Sierra Norte de Guadalajara natural park, a single-track road picked its way through ancient forests of gall oak and juniper. Bald peaks reared up in the near distance; Ocejón, the highest of them at 2,046 metres (6,713ft), bore a sugar-dusting of recent snow. In recent years the Iberian wolf, which in the 1970s hovered on the verge of extinction, has returned to the mountains of the Sierra Norte. Birds of prey, perched on the treetops, swivelled their gaze as we passed.
Twenty years ago, these silent lands were the site of an extraordinary social phenomenon. In June 2005 the socialist government of José Luis Zapatero brought in a law making same-sex marriage legal. After pushback from a number of conservative mayors who declined to officiate at gay weddings in their ayuntamientos (town halls), others declared themselves open for business – among them Francisco Maroto, mayor of Campillo de Ranas in Guadalajara. The news spread fast, boosted by Andrés Rubio’s documentary Campillo Sí, Quiero (Campillo Yes, I Do, 2007), and before long gay couples were beating a path to a village in the middle of nowhere with two dozen inhabitants.
As a beneficiary of the 2005 law – I married my Spanish partner five years later in a civil wedding in rural Extremadura – I had long been intrigued by the story of Campillo de Ranas. Twenty years down the line seemed like a good moment to see it for myself. The visit would also involve exploring a region that, even after 35 years in Spain, I had never once set foot in.
The landscape seemed to stretch out as if physically pulled from both sides. For about 20 miles (30km) we drove without seeing another car. Long-horned cattle dawdled over the single-track roads as if they, and not the occasional motor vehicle, had right of way. Dotted among the scrub and forest of a wide valley flanked with mountains were villages whose dark colours made them almost indistinguishable from their surroundings: the pueblos negros of north-western Guadalajara, so-called because their houses and churches are built entirely of slate.
Campillo de Ranas is one of these “black villages”. Though never exactly prosperous, for much of its history Campillo scraped a subsistence living from livestock farming and forestry. At its height, in 1877, the village had a population of 827, falling gradually for half a century and then dramatically in the post-civil war period, when internal migration drew workers to the factories of Barcelona and Bilbao. When Francisco arrived here from Madrid in 1984 this was, in his words, “like a Celtic hamlet lost to the rest of the world”. Just three families lived permanently in the village, which still had no mains electricity or running water. Women did their washing in the stream; goats roamed the unpaved streets. By the 21st century, rural tourism was taking off in Spain and a new awareness of the area’s unique architectural heritage was bringing in a trickle of visitors – but still Campillo de Ranas had only one casa rural (the common designation for a country lodging).
I spoke to Francisco in the small office where he attends to mayoral business on two mornings a week. In pride of place on his desk stood a small rainbow flag. “I started the gay marriage thing as an act of political militancy, and of course I never imagined it would have the repercussions it did,” he said. “What a wedding signifies economically is that you’ve got 150 people who are going to eat 150 meals, and you’ll need to hire 16 people to serve them.”
The first gay couple to be married in the village were Alex and Santi from Madrid, who read about Francisco’s progressive stance and got in there promptly on 21 November 2005. There followed a flood of bookings, the initial boom partly owing to a historical backlog of couples who had been waiting for years for their rights to be enshrined in law. Among the first wave were the mayor himself and his boyfriend, Quique, in 2007. Since then the village has hosted more than 1,000 ceremonies, with couples coming from as far afield as Japan, Iceland and the US to tie the knot. One thing that’s changed is that, if at first Campillo was known for LGBTQ+ weddings, hetero unions now make up the great majority. Though, as Francisco said, both gay and straight weddings feature essentially the same cast of characters: immediate family, relations, and a gang of friends who themselves may or may not be LGBTQ+.
Either way, the effect on the economy has been notable. Campillo and its four hamlets now have 19 casas rurales and five restaurants between them, most of which serve the wedding market and offer fixed employment for locals. A powerful word-of-mouth effect among wedding guests brings in yet more couples to Campillo and also has an impact on property in the village, with about 70% of houses now owned by outsiders. If the population has not grown hugely, it has at least stabilised at 50.
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The mayor and his husband have since divorced, but Quique still lives in Campillo, where he helps to run a popular wedding venue, Aldea Tejera Negra. He showed us the series of handsome stone-built barns equipped with a covered banqueting space and the dancefloor where he spins the disco tunes himself. Among the couples on his list of upcoming receptions – 42 in total this year – I saw Julio and Andrés, Carlos and Mario, Beatriz and Pilar. “I’ve lived here for 31 years and have never had insults or anything remotely like it,” said Quique. “You can walk around the village holding hands and no pasa nada.”
Which happens to confirm my own experience of LGBTQ+ life in a small rural community in Spain: in a place without a middle class and with a sometimes pursed-lipped morality, sexuality tends to be less interesting than the fact of being from somewhere else.
In the streets of nearby Campillejo, a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it village of slate-built houses, the silence was deep as a millpond: cooing doves made the only sound. We stopped at the bar-restaurant Los Manzanos, one of the few eating-places open on a year-round basis in the “black villages”. David García-Alcalá Cuenca, who runs the bar, brought us a hearty lunch of stewed lentils and grilled sirloin of local avileña beef, telling us that he and his husband were married by Francisco Maroto in the town hall of Campillo de Ranas and held the reception at Aldea Tejera Negra.
Afterwards, we meandered between the scattered pueblos, ranking each one for prettiness and preservation as we went. Majaelrayo, El Espinar, Umbralejo – all had solid little foursquare churches with beamed porches and bell towers rising shyly from among the slate-tiled roofs. From the hamlet of Roblelacasa (population 22), we hiked the few miles down a stony track, past walled enclosures still used to protect beehives – heather honey being, along with prime beef, the main gastronomic delicacy of the pueblos negros. The trail ended at a waterfall, the Cascadas del Aljibe, powering its way through a deep romantic gorge.
Two hours later we were back in the smog and the noise of Madrid (population almost 3.5 million), still buzzing from our day out on the lonely roads of Guadalajara. The fact that such a silent wilderness, practically devoid of human habitation, lay no more than 60 miles as the crow flies from the Puerta del Sol, was tough to get our heads around. After all my years here – 15 of them as a married man – it’s good to know Spain hasn’t lost its capacity to surprise.
Paul Richardson is author of Hidden Valley: Finding Freedom in Spain’s Deep Country (Abacus, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
