Repoblacion
= an attempt to apply network and cooperative thinking to territorial regeneration, in the Extramadura region of Spain
URL = https://www.repoblacion.ong/
Description
Via ChatGPT, prompted by Michel Bauwens:
Fundación Repoblación is interesting because it represents an attempt to apply network and cooperative thinking to territorial regeneration.
Its central proposition can be summarized as:
Repopulation is not primarily about moving people into empty villages. It is about reconstructing the social, economic, technological and material conditions that make a village a viable place to live.
The practical experiments in Valverde de Burguillos and Burguillos del Cerro are therefore best understood as a living laboratory for post-depopulation rural development, rather than as a single agricultural or migration project.
The foundation's central proposition can be summarised as follows: Repopulation is not primarily about moving people into empty villages. It is about reconstructing the social, economic, technological and material conditions that make a village a viable place to live.
Rather than approaching depopulation principally as a demographic problem, Repoblación treats the rural territory as a place in which new forms of living, working, producing and organising can be constructed. Its work combines housing, employment, entrepreneurship, digital rights, local production, cooperative organisation, ecological transition and cultural life.
The practical experiments in Valverde de Burguillos and Burguillos del Cerro are therefore best understood as a living laboratory for post-depopulation rural development, rather than as a single agricultural or migration project.
Fundación Repoblación / Repoblación
Fundación Repoblación, formally the Fundación para la Repoblación Sostenible, is a Spanish non-profit initiative working on rural repopulation and territorial regeneration, with its principal base in Valverde de Burguillos, Badajoz, Extremadura. It is associated particularly with the work of David de Ugarte, María Rodríguez and a wider network around the Compañía Maximalista cooperative and Centro de Estudios Maximalistas.
Rather than approaching depopulation principally as a demographic problem, Repoblación treats the rural territory as a place in which new forms of living, working, producing and organizing can be constructed. Its work combines housing, employment, entrepreneurship, digital rights, local production, cooperative organization, ecological transition and cultural life.
Status
Current institutional connections
By 2024–26, Fundación Repoblación had moved into collaboration with public institutions and European programs.
It is a beneficiary in the ATLAS Interreg Sudoe project, alongside the Junta de Extremadura, ACTYVA, CSIC and Portuguese and French partners.
(https://interreg-sudoe.eu/proyecto-interreg/atlas/)
It has also worked with Red.es around rural digital rights and participated in the Spanish Observatorio de Derechos Digitales ecosystem.
This gives the initiative a somewhat unusual position: it began as a relatively small, place-based civil-society project but has increasingly become a node connecting local experimentation with regional, national and European policy networks.
History
(For the prehistory of the organizing kernet, and how and where these ideas developed, see our entry on Las Indias.)
Origins and institutional form
The foundation was constituted on 29 November 2023 by Compañía Maximalista, Sociedad Cooperativa and registered in the Spanish Register of Foundations on 15 April 2024, under registration number 2869. Its registered address is Plaza de España 1, Valverde de Burguillos, Badajoz. Its initial endowment was €40,000 and its formal purpose is the “sustainable repopulation” of villages, districts and regions experiencing demographic crisis.
(https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2024-11461)
At its constitution, David de Ugarte García was appointed president. The founding governance also involved Compañía Maximalista, represented by Natalia Fernández García, and Centro de Estudios Maximalistas, represented by María Rodríguez Muñoz.
(https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2024-11461)
The organization has subsequently developed a larger operational team. Its current public site lists María Rodríguez as General Director, alongside staff working on administration and spaces, organization, projects, housing and youth.
Initiatives
Place-based strategy
The practical centre of the initiative is the cluster of villages around Valverde de Burguillos and Burguillos del Cerro, in the province of Badajoz.
The approach is explicitly place-based: rather than designing a generic anti-depopulation program and applying it to rural Spain, Repoblación works through particular villages and their existing social, economic and material resources.
The project has therefore developed around questions such as:
- How can people be attracted to or return to small villages?
- How can residents build sustainable livelihoods locally?
- What kinds of housing and rehabilitation make rural settlement possible?
- How can digital infrastructure reduce rather than reproduce the disadvantages of rural location?
- How can local cooperatives and small businesses create employment?
- How can water, energy, food and other basic infrastructures become locally resilient?
- How can rural communities participate in the design of their own development?
A 2025 account of the RuralNEXT project describes it as emerging from debates involving local residents, experts and public institutions at the 2024 NEB Fest in Valverde de Burguillos, with an explicitly “bottom-up” orientation.
RuralNEXT - Extramadura, Spain
RuralNEXT is one of the principal practical programs associated with the initiative. It is centred on Burguillos del Cerro and connects rural development with employment, inclusion, digitalization and innovation.
The project involves Fundación Repoblación together with local government, cooperatives and other organizations. Its stated objective is not simply to attract residents but to improve the conditions under which people can actually live and work in the territory.
The inauguration of the RuralNEXT space in March 2025 brought together Fundación Repoblación, Compañía Maximalista, the municipalities of Burguillos del Cerro and Valverde de Burguillos, the Junta de Extremadura and other partners. The project has been presented as an example of territorial innovation connecting employment, inclusion, digitalization and rural development.
The initiative also has a strong New European Bauhaus (NEB) dimension. The annual Rural NEB Fest uses the three NEB principles—beautiful, sustainable and together—as a framework for thinking about rural transformation.
(https://festival.repoblacion.ong/)
Digital rights and rural sovereignty
An unusual feature of Repoblación is the importance it gives to digital rights and technological sovereignty.
In 2025 it organized the first Encuentro sobre Derechos Digitales y Repoblación in Burguillos del Cerro and Valverde de Burguillos. The resulting manifesto, backed by around one hundred organizations, argued for full digital citizenship in rural areas, open technologies, adequate infrastructure, continuous digital education and locally appropriate digitalization.
The underlying argument is that connectivity should not merely be treated as a technical service. Digital infrastructure affects whether rural inhabitants can access employment, public services, education and wider networks of economic and social cooperation.
This theme has continued into subsequent editions of the project. In 2026 the foundation participated in a second Encuentro de Derechos Digitales y Repoblación, again held between Burguillos del Cerro and Valverde de Burguillos.
https://www.derechosdigitales.gob.es/es/agenda/ii-encuentro-de-derechos-digitales-y-repoblacion
Housing and the material basis of repopulation
Housing is another major component. The project treats repopulation as impossible without addressing the physical ability of people to establish themselves in villages.
Repoblación's team includes a coordinator for housing projects, while its broader program links rehabilitation and new forms of habitation with employment and territorial regeneration. The foundation has also participated in wider discussions around rural housing and the future of habitation beyond conventional urban models.
This is significant because the project moves beyond the common framing of depopulation as simply a question of incentives for newcomers: the village itself has to become capable of supporting a new generation of inhabitants.
Water, food and territorial infrastructure
The initiative also works on the physical infrastructures that make rural settlement viable.
A 2024–25 technical project associated with Repoblación examined water management in Valverde de Burguillos and Burguillos del Cerro, describing the two municipalities as pioneering sites for sustainable rural repopulation.
(https://memoria.repoblacion.ong/stage)
The foundation's participation in the ATLAS Interreg Sudoe project further places it within a network concerned with rural agro-food “third places,” ecological agriculture, agroecology, social innovation and rural development. In that project Fundación Repoblación is listed alongside the Junta de Extremadura, ACTYVA cooperative, CSIC and organizations from Portugal and France.
(https://interreg-sudoe.eu/proyecto-interreg/atlas/)
This suggests that Repoblación's concept of rural regeneration is not limited to demographic migration. It encompasses the productive and infrastructural ecology of a territory.
Festivals and network-building
Since 2024 the organization has run the Festival Repoblación / Rural NEB Fest in Valverde de Burguillos and neighbouring villages.
The festival functions simultaneously as a cultural event, policy forum, networking mechanism and laboratory for rural development. Sessions have covered subjects including rural architecture, employment, cooperatives, digital rights, energy communities, local production, housing, food and the New European Bauhaus.
The 2025 edition, for example, brought together municipal leaders, architects, researchers, cooperatives, public agencies and rural initiatives, while the 2026 edition continued the program around energy, digital and food sovereignty and cooperation.
(https://festival.repoblacion.ong/)
The festivals are therefore part of the project's methodology: create a network around a place, rather than merely promoting the place from outside.
Discussion
A Rural Re-Industrialization Perspective
Source: El escenario industrial que viene: nuevas posibilidades para los territorios rurales. Fundacion Repoblacion. 2025.
URL = https://repoblacion.ong/analisis/informes_1_reindustrializacion-rural.md
DeepSeek, prompted by Michel Bauwens:
The foundation's approach to re-industrialisation is not about recreating the old model of large, centralised industrial plants, but about distributing production across the territory using new technologies and processes that are viable at smaller scales. This aligns closely with the analysis presented in the Fundación Repoblación analysis document on industrial sovereignty.
* The Crisis of the Old Industrial Model
The analysis document identifies the deep crisis facing European heavy industry—steel, chemicals, cement—as it closes plants and moves production to China or the US, driven by energy costs and an ageing, inefficient industrial park. This is not merely a European problem: even in China, overcapacity and falling profitability plague the sector, with "blind expansion" leading to a situation where "the connection between designed capacity and actual production has weakened over time".
Crucially, the document argues that this crisis is not an immutable law of physics or an unbreakable principle, but the result of a specific industrial growth model. Technological evolution has been pushing for decades towards smaller-scale plants with electric furnaces, recycled scrap, and direct reduction processes with hydrogen. Meanwhile, 3D printing of metal parts has advanced to the point where structural elements can be produced with much smaller investments and scales than conventional plants.
* The Opportunity for Distributed Production
The analysis presents a fundamental choice:
"Why build outdated concentrated plants in a few centres when there are new technologies and processes that allow production to be distributed across the territory, satisfying local needs for products (chemicals, construction materials, fertilisers, etc.) at low cost and creating new jobs?"
This is the core of the re-industrialisation opportunity. It is not about replicating on a small scale the same processes used by large industrial concentrations. Rather, it is about deploying processes that work at small scale using raw materials of very extensive distribution or waste materials from other productive branches existing in the territory.
- Concrete Technological Possibilities
The document points to several existing or emerging possibilities:
Local fertiliser production: Mini-plants to produce fertiliser at a local scale.
Biomass-based chemistry: Production of methanol and other useful intermediates from biomass, which has struggled at large scale but could be viable locally.
Automated synthesis: Portable, reconfigurable mini-plants—some even 3D-printed—that use a chemical programming language and allow production according to local needs. One such platform, the C3PU, is described as "a portable chemical synthesis platform the size of a suitcase that contains all the modules necessary for synthesis and purification".
AI and automation: Advances in AI, process automation, and the digitalisation of chemistry make it possible to "democratise molecular innovation".
* Strategic Implications
The document concludes that the future has two axes: a technological axis (already a reality awaiting productive insertion) and a strategic axis (which depends on political will and local entrepreneurial capacity).
For Spain, which has historically lacked a comprehensive national industrial policy but has a highly decentralised administrative organisation, this new scenario would give new competitive protagonism to the autonomous communities and, above all, a unique historical opportunity to local industrial entrepreneurship in all its possible forms.
Relationship to David de Ugarte and the Maximalist milieu
David de Ugarte is the most visible intellectual figure associated with the initiative and was the foundation's founding president. The foundation itself, however, is institutionally broader than his personal activity.
Its origins are connected to Compañía Maximalista S.Coop. and Centro de Estudios Maximalistas, which were involved in its creation.
(https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2024-11461)
The wider intellectual background is therefore important. Repoblación can be understood partly as an extension into physical territory of a longer-running interest in distributed networks, cooperative organization, digital communities and post-urban forms of organization.
The distinctive move is from thinking about networks primarily as digital/social structures toward asking what happens when those principles are applied to actual villages, land, housing, infrastructure and local economies.
Relation to the wider Spanish “repoblación” movement
Repoblación should not be confused with the broader Spanish rural-repopulation movement. Spain has a large ecosystem of initiatives addressing depopulation, rural entrepreneurship, ecological agriculture, local government and return migration.
What distinguishes this initiative is its attempt to combine several normally separate domains:
demography + housing + work + cooperatives + digital infrastructure + ecological transition + culture + local governance.
The project is consequently closer to a territorial development laboratory than to a conventional “move to the countryside” campaign.
More information
The main public hub is repoblacion.ong. The foundation currently provides
https://memoria.repoblacion.ong/
For the intellectual heritage and connections, see: Compania Maximalista
Related entities
Fundación para la Repoblación Sostenible — Valverde de Burguillos, Badajoz
David de Ugarte — founding president
María Rodríguez — current General Director
Compañía Maximalista S.Coop. — founding organization
Centro de Estudios Maximalistas — founding/governance partner
RuralNEXT — major territorial development program
Rural NEB Fest / Festival Repoblación — annual cultural and policy gathering
Valverde de Burguillos — principal local base
Burguillos del Cerro — major partner municipality
ATLAS Interreg Sudoe — European collaboration
Observatorio de Derechos Digitales — digital-rights network