Sinforosa Sancho, 89, and Martín Colomer, 88, were the only two inhabitants of La Estrella, the town in Teruel that they have just left after almost five decades of living alone.
The years and their health problems have meant that they have gone to live with their son in the Castellón town of Villafranca.
La Estrella thus joins the more than 60 uninhabited nuclei that the province of Teruel has and another 90 at risk of depopulation.
The tenacity of Sinforosa and Martín to keep their town alive, an example of emptied Spain, was the subject of media attention and at Christmas 2018 they starred in the advertisement for the car brand Land Rover, which wanted to choose a true story to promote their vehicles.
In the advertisement they appeared with their cats and dogs, they also had chickens and bees, and images of some illuminated buildings in the town, including the 18th-century sanctuary of the Virgen de la Estrella.
And a big tree before which Sinforosa and Martín remembered their Christmases. “Christmas before here was normal. They were maybe until three in the morning dancing and jumping. It seems like yesterday, but 60 years have passed.”
The couple appeared walking through the town, picking vegetables from their garden, lately they had put an oak plantation to grow truffles, or preparing something to eat at home.
At the end of the ad you could hear: “We wanted to bring Christmas to Martín and Sinforosa, but in the end they gave us the gift.”
They had been living alone in the town for almost 50 years and they were reluctant to leave, but their son Vicente did not want them to continue in La Estrella and preferred that they go with him, his wife and their son to Villafranca, a town in Castellón with which it borders.
The concern was logical since to get to La Estrella you have to travel more than 24 kilometers along a narrow forest road that runs between steep ravines.
In addition, there is no coverage and to talk on the mobile phone they have to go up the mountain. During the snowfall of the Philomena storm in 2021 they were left isolated and incommunicado.
They did not have running water in the house, they were supplied from a public fountain and, until a few years ago, there was no electricity either. They assured that they were governed by the sundial in the square, although time was not a problem for them: “We eat when we are hungry and we go to sleep when we get sleepy, without looking at the time.”
Their life lacked luxuries, but they didn’t need anything else. “We have grown up here and we are not called to go to another place. Here we are wonderfully taking care of each other and our animals.”
Sinforosa and Martín were used to receiving tourists on weekends, for whom they organized a guided tour of the sanctuary, the church and the streets of the town. In addition, every year the residents of Mosqueruela, in the Gúdar-Javalambre region, to which La Estrella belongs, go up to the sanctuary on a pilgrimage.
Silforosa, Martín and the town of La Estrella appeared in one of the reports of the series “Where oblivion lives”, published a few summers ago in EL MUNDO.
In the town, which had almost 300 inhabitants in the 1940s, details of its history remain: from a flood in 1883 that destroyed 17 houses and killed 26 people, to the plaque in memory of the bullfighter Silvino Zafón, born in 1908 in the town and known as El Niño de la Estrella, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1963 in France.
Martín recalled that the postwar period “was very hard. We saw how they took people away to be shot, our friends with their children.” La Estrella was a refuge for maquis from where they passed to neighboring Valencia.
When asked how long they planned to continue alone in the town, Sinforosa and Martín always answer the same thing: “Until we last, which won’t be long either.” Now, with his departure, La Estrella has been left without light and without its guardians.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project