Spanish village of 321 inhabitants seeks barkeeper for 160 euros a month
Berbegal offers El Meridiano on the village square on a four-year concession, price and applicant qualifications decide
Images
Noch sind die Stühle leer. Doch wenn sich schnell ein neuer Betreiber für das „El Meridiano“ im spanischen Berbegal findet, können sich die Dorfbewohner wieder hier treffenFoto: facebook.com/elmeridianoberbegal
Foto: facebook.com/elmeridianoberbegal
Die Konzession für das Dorflokal wird im Rahmen eines offenen Wettbewerbs vergebenFoto: berbegal.org
Foto: berbegal.org
The municipality of Berbegal, in the hilly province of Huesca in northeastern Spain, is looking for someone to run its bar-restaurant, El Meridiano. The monthly minimum rent is 160 euros for the 214-square-metre establishment on the Plaza España, kitchen included, Bild reports. The concession runs for four years and is awarded through open competition, with the best price offer and the applicant's qualifications carrying the decision.
El Meridiano is the social centre of a village of 321 people: where residents meet for coffee, an aperitif, and the conversation that constitutes most of a village's public life. When it closes, the village doesn't just lose a business — it loses its living room. The municipal tender is the local state doing what it can, which amounts to finding one private person willing to bear the risk in exchange for near-zero fixed costs.
The offer belongs to a growing genre across depopulated rural Europe. In April, the village of Arenillas in Soria — home to around forty people — offered free apartments and jobs to new residents and received more than a hundred applications within days. Berbegal's version is less generous but more honest: not a subsidy, just a low rent and a genuine business. A barkeeper who can serve 321 people coffee in the morning and beer in the evening needs roughly the revenue of a bad food truck, because the costs are 160 euros a month and the competition is nonexistent.
Spain, for what it's worth, ranked first among expat destinations for the third year running in the InterNations survey, with 84 percent of foreign residents satisfied against a global average of 67. The climate helps. But what people are buying, in Arenillas as in Berbegal, is a place where the rent doesn't eat the business before the customers arrive.