ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, the experience of Spanish rural areas has been transformed. During the 1960s and 1970s, rural Spain was characterised by an exodus brought about by agricultural modernisation and the growth of the industrial sector in non-rural areas. Over the last two decades, in contrast, a new rural restructuring has taken place. This is marked by a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors: political (the democratisation process, political decentralisation to the regions, the entry of Spain into the European Union), cultural (the expansion of new post-materialist values emphasising the local level and the preservation of environment), and socioeconomic (the emergence of new non-farming actors in rural areas). Such a restructuring has also been influenced by rural development policies. From the point of view of territorial identity, development programmes have contributed to the definition of an supra-local community (comarca) where there once was only a collection of small villages, absorbed in parochial disputes.
