Half the population disappearing: myth or near destiny?

The starting line of demographic erosion

Between the 2011 Census and the 2021 Census, released by INE in 2021, the map of the Alentejo shrank visibly and continuously across multiple points of the territory. In the municipality of Moura, the population drop reached 14.3% in the span of ten years, shrinking the resident community from 15,167 to 12,989 inhabitants, according to official 2021 PORDATA records. This expressive reduction is not an isolated case along the banks of the Guadiana or near the border.

Other municipalities recorded perfectly parallel trajectories of human depletion during the same decennial period monitored by INE in 2021. Castelo de Vide saw 12.6% of its inhabitants disappear, while Gavião recorded a 13.8% loss of its resident population, according to data gathered by PORDATA in 2021. In the district of Portalegre, the municipality of Avis followed the same downward path, recording an 11.2% drop in the number of residents between 2011 and 2021, according to INE.

For those living in these municipalities, the loss of more than a tenth of the population in a decade translates into the closure of primary schools, a lack of local commercial services, and the desertification of main streets. The relative weight of each lost inhabitant directly affects the economic sustainability of local authorities and their ability to maintain sanitation, transport, and healthcare networks for an increasingly smaller and older community.

The profound imbalance between cradles and graves

The root of the demographic problem lies in an insurmountable gap between the number of new births and the volume of deaths recorded annually in each municipality. In 2022, the natural balance in the municipality of Mértola stood at -118 people, according to official demographic statistics published by INE in 2022. This means that far more people died than were born, creating a structural deficit impossible to bridge without external inflows.

The scarcity of new births reaches critical levels in territories such as the municipality of Sousel, where the birth rate remained at 4.2 live births per thousand inhabitants in 2022, according to economic and social indicators from INE in 2022. This figure is well below the national average recorded in the same year of 2022, which stood at 7.7 live births per thousand inhabitants, highlighting the wide gap between urban Portugal and the interior Alentejo.

With so few births, the age pyramid has inverted drastically in recent decades, losing the shape of a pyramid and taking on the silhouette of a stake. The aging index in Alcoutim reached an impressive 656.5 elderly people for every 100 young people in 2023, according to PORDATA data from 2023. In direct comparison, Portugal's national average aging index stood at 191.1 elderly people per 100 young people in 2023, showing that Alcoutim triples the national proportion of retired population compared to the young.

The geography of abandonment and the gray wall

Human thinning is reflected relentlessly in the territorial occupation density, transforming entire municipalities into almost uninhabited spaces. In 2021, the municipality of Marvão had a population density of just 13.4 inhabitants per square kilometer, according to official PORDATA calculations for 2021. In such a dispersed territory, distances between neighbors increase, and public services become logistically unsustainable to maintain.

The continuous departure of active young people has structural roots linked to the lack of mobility opportunities and qualified employment outside the major regional urban axes. A report by the Interior Observatory of the University of Beira Interior, published in 2020, points to the lack of adequate rail and road accessibility as a determining factor in the expulsion of young people from the municipalities of Nisa and Crato toward the coast.

For those who remain in these lands, daily life is conditioned by dozens of kilometers traveled to the nearest pharmacy, health center, or ATM. The absence of regular public transport exacerbates the institutional isolation of the elderly, turning old age into absolute geographical isolation in an Alentejo that has lost the capacity to retain its own future generations.

The myth of irrigation and the false promise of intensive agriculture

The obvious reading usually put on the table suggests that mega-public investments in infrastructure and the transition to high-yield agriculture would automatically solve population loss. The Alqueva irrigation project, initiated in 2002 by EDIA, was widely championed as the great anchor capable of retaining the population and reversing the desertification of the Alentejo territory. However, 2021 INE reports show that the population hemorrhage in the Baixo Alentejo continued relentlessly throughout the 2011 to 2021 decade.

The arrival of large intensive agricultural holdings altered the economic framework of areas like the Alentejo, but generated a very particular and limited demographic model. The newspaper Público reported in May 2023 that the installation of these agricultural companies attracted thousands of foreign workers to fill labor shortages, but this punctual migratory influx failed to reverse deep aging or the structural loss of national residents.

The exception that proves the rule of interior desertification is the municipality of Odemira, where the migratory balance stood at a positive value of plus 1,026 people in 2022, according to official INE data for 2022. Even so, this dynamism linked to intensive farming fields contrasts sharply with the stagnation and demographic decline of most other Alentejo municipalities, proving that irrigation does not act as an automatic vaccine against aging.

The statistical horizon drawn from Lisbon

The macroeconomic and demographic projections released by INE in 2022 indicate that the resident population in Portugal may decrease by about 10% by 2080. However, the same statistical agency warns that in the Alentejo the drop could well exceed 25% in several municipalities of the deep interior over the coming decades. For those living in these territories, these figures are not abstract office numbers, but rather the countdown to the extinction of entire parishes.

The practical impact of this future demographic contraction places unprecedented pressure on local mayors, who are forced to manage dwindling municipal budgets with oversized infrastructure for populations that are no longer there. Maintaining water, sanitation, and waste collection networks for villages where half a dozen elderly residents live becomes unsustainable, anticipating scenarios of forced population concentration in a few towns and municipal seats.

Without a radical reversal in public policies regarding mobility, the settling of young families, and decentralized health networks, the Alentejo risks transforming itself into a territory of intensive economic transit devoid of an autochthonous social fabric. Current figures show that decline is not a future academic hypothesis, but an accelerated ongoing process whose timeframes are now measured in years rather than generations.