Spain’s aging population is struggling with the digitalization of the financial system—and the far right is seizing the moment.

MARCH 19, 2024

My father, a truck driver, travels every Sunday from Fuente-Tójar, a small town in Andalusia, to Almería, a city on the other side of the region, and comes back home every Friday. Each time he leaves for the week, the same scene plays out. Standing with his packed bags at the entrance to our house, he checks his wallet.

“Any cash on hand?” he asks. “I forgot to withdraw from the ATM. I’ll just make a quick run before hitting the road.”

“Don’t you dare!” my mother replies. “What if the machine swallows your card? It happens all the time.”

“Then what should I do?”

“I don’t know — just figure that out once you’re in the city. Not here.”

Conversations like this are not exactly uncommon in Fuente-Tójar, which has a population of a little over 600 but is lively and bustling for its size. Murals depicting former inhabitants and their crafts adorn the village houses, and one of the town’s distinctive dances, a fertility ritual around the almond trees, has evolved into a popular festival held every May 15.

The lack of cash hangs over almost all operations in Fuente-Tójar. Want to buy food? You’ll need cash. Want to go to the hairdresser? Cash only.

Like many other villages in Spain that are dealing with an aging population, Fuente-Tójar grapples with a major problem, one that has caught the eye of the country’s far right: It’s almost impossible to get any money here. There is only one ATM, and it never really works.

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In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, banks across Europe reduced operating costs by downsizing. Many banks chose to close branches in areas with lower populations to increase efficiency and profitability. The rise of online and telephone banking services only furthered that trend. But the decrease in bank branches meant people — mainly the elderly — who relied entirely on in-person services were in danger of being left behind.

Nowhere in Europe was this more pronounced than in Spain, which has faced unparalleled bank closures. By 2023, the country had only 17,597 bank branches, down from 45,700 in 2008.

The brunt of these closures has fallen on the country’s rural areas. As of April 2023, more than half of the villages in Spain lacked a physical bank branch.

This is the case in Fuente-Tójar. Before 2020, the town had two bank branches and a financial agent, an individual authorized by a bank to process money transfers and bill payments, for a population of 666 inhabitants — a quarter of whom are over the age of 65.

But between 2021 and 2022, the two main banks left town, citing “lack of profitability.” The financial agent stayed, but he can only serve the cash needs of a restricted number of clients. Otherwise, the village must rely on a single malfunctioning ATM.

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The lack of cash hangs over almost all operations in Fuente-Tójar. Want to buy food? You’ll need cash. Want to go to the hairdresser? Cash only. This makes daily life in town logistically difficult. Cash is the only method of payment at the street market every Monday. Both the local bakery and the roaming bread van — which travels from village to village — only take cash. The same is true for the gas delivery driver, two of the village’s three restaurants and the priest. Memorial services, baptisms, weddings and first communions are all cash only.

“Here, it’s not like in the city,” says Antoñi Malagón, a middle-aged street cleaner. “You need cash for every little thing, to live … for everything.”

Under a bright sun, she grasps a broom and clears away fallen leaves near the town square. Every time a neighbor crosses the street, she greets them with smiles. These cleaning duties — part of the local council’s program to support unemployed people — are her sole source of income, a situation common in the village.

She says neither she nor her husband knows how to withdraw money from the ATM.

“Online banking?” she says. “The other day, I lost that little green phone [icon], and there was no way it would reappear.”

The drive to the nearest bank — in the town of Priego de Córdoba, some eight miles away — takes 20 minutes. It goes through sinewy mountain roads on poorly kept pavement. Once in Priego, finding a spot to park can take even longer.

For many in Fuente-Tójar, the task of the drive falls on adult children.

Getting cash can also be a family affair, as in the case of Purificación Gutiérrez, an 85-year-old retiree. Since the banks closed, one of her sons has withdrawn cash in the town where he lives and brought it to his parents almost every week. Her other son lives in Fuente-Tójar, but his work schedule as a truck driver doesn’t allow him to drive to the bank often. If both sons are busy, then her grandchildren have to take the car and drive to Priego instead.

Gutiérrez uses a credit card at the grocery store. But she can’t do much else with it. Her husband just turned 89. Neither knows how to withdraw cash from the ATM. Her husband doesn’t know how to use the card at the grocery store. “At least I know how to get by,” she says.

Fuente-Tójar was once a town of 3,000, but that number has dwindled as people — especially the youth — move away for better employment opportunities.

The loss of population has changed the town. Every summer, it used to host a scavenger hunt. The entire community would wear costumes, decorate the buildings, organize games and even shows. The last one took place in 2016. Now there aren’t enough young people to take care of the preparations.

With the decrease in population came, inevitably, the fear of losing basic services.

When she learned about the possibility of bank closures back in 2021, Mayor Mari Fe Muñoz, who belongs to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, arranged meetings with representatives from both banks and initiated a petition. Residents from the neighboring towns were also invited to participate. More than 700 people signed it in just a few days, urging the branches to remain open.

Every couple of days, someone loses a card inside the machine or is unable to operate it due to a technical error, locals say.

But a bank representative from Cajasur, one of the banks, told Muñoz that it was not profitable to keep an office open when it had so few clients. Cajasur announced that it would leave in November 2021; and the other bank, Caja Rural, followed the next year. Both banks deemed their branches in Fuente-Tójar “no longer profitable nor sustainable” due to depopulation and aging inhabitants. (Neither bank replied to The Dial’s requests for comment.)

By early 2022, two ATMs remained, one for each bank. But shortly after the personnel and the surveillance cameras left, a group of thieves robbed one of the banks in the middle of the night, absconding with Cajasur’s ATM. The ATM was never found, nor were the culprits identified. Only Caja Rural’s ATM remained.

For those who need to transfer money or pay bills, there’s a financial agent, affiliated with a third bank. But he is limited to basic services. He also can only give out cash to the clients of the bank he serves — still a minority in the village, as most people have their life savings with one of the other two banks.

I spent three weeks in Fuente-Tójar writing this article. On the first day, the lone ATM in town wasn’t operational, displaying only a message on its screen: “Please wait a moment.” Over the next three weeks, the message never changed. Every couple of days, someone loses a card inside the machine or is unable to operate it due to a technical error, locals say. Fixing it means calling the branch in Priego, which can take over a day to address the issue.

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ATMs in Spain have become an issue for the country’s far right.

The country’s far-right party Vox, which otherwise focuses on issues such as migration, Catalan separatism and family values, has said banks should be declared “essential services.” Members of the party have couched this in terms of elder protection. “We couldn’t ask the elderly to operate online after trusting local branches for their whole lives,” said Yolanda Merelo Palomares, a senator from the party, in February 2022.

In April 2022, Vox asked the ruling Regionalist Party of Cantabria, which governed with the support of the Socialist Party to demand action on the digital divide among the elderly. In the regional parliament of the northern province of Cantabria, the debate was soon taken up by the conservative Popular Party. But the measures didn’t go any further.

How exactly to fix the problem has become a source of further discussion. One proposal seeks to mandate at a national level that banks in populations of at least 5,000 inhabitants have at least one ATM. However, smaller communities like Fuente-Tójar remain unaccounted for in this initiative. It also doesn’t address the issue of the elderly not knowing how to use an ATM.

All the parliamentary groups in the Congress except for Vox expressed their support for the initiative. From the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Deputy Alicia Álvarez González emphasized that the regulation has “ample room for improvement,” which the Socialists expect to introduce via amendments during the law’s processing.

Vox has seen its support grow in rural areas. Fuente-Tójar, which historically has been a stronghold of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, saw an increase in right-wing votes in the most recent elections, on July 18, 2023. The right wing now holds nearly half of the village’s political representation.

Representatives from the conservative parties have accused the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party of being “too lenient” and “letting the banks go” from the village. Muñoz says she has done everything she can.

A spokesperson for the village’s conservative Popular Party told me in a letter that the lack of inhabitants in Fuente-Tójar was the “major concern,” as it was the main motivation for the closure of bank branches and other public services.

“The current municipal government is not facilitating the establishment of new companies, nor is it creating incentives for existing ones,” the spokesperson for the party said. “Therefore … there is a great lack of municipal policies to help people to stay and live in the town.”

Meanwhile, the inhabitants do what they can. Eva Molina, a street cleaner employed by the town council program, says she closed her bank account at Cajasur in 2021.

Even though he does not provide ATM services, she wanted to open a new account with the financial agent to keep some human contact. The process was so fraught that she almost lost her government assistance. The payment remained pending for over a year, as they were trying to transfer the money to an account that did no longer exist.

“I’m lucky enough to have a car and be able to drive to Priego,” she says, describing how she could fix the problem. “But [what about] those who can’t? What are they supposed to do?”

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As I drive through Fuente-Tójar, I stumble upon the ATM again, its screen frozen on a perpetual “Please wait a moment.” The streets are empty. The town square is deserted. Will the ATM still be here the next time I come home?