Cushioned but hollowed out: coal’s end and the demographic legacy of Spain’s mining communities

Between 2018 and 2020 Spain closed almost its entire coal sector, abruptly and in a handful of mining districts, under a just-transition agreement that retired displaced miners early. I ask what the closures did to the population of the mining municipalities and whether the cleaner air they left behind drew anyone in Comparing the municipalities that the government classified as most affected by the mine closures with non-mining municipalities on the same pre-closure population path, I find that the two move together until the closures and then diverge: the mining municipalities lose about three percent of their population by 2022. The loss is larger where coal mattered more and survives randomization inference. It did not arrive as unemployment, which fell relative to controls because early retirement converted dismissal into pension, and it was not offset by newcomers: in-migration to the areas whose air improved most does not respond, an improvement that was small in this low-pollution setting. The transition therefore delivered justice to workers without securing the territory. Read through the lens of territorial justice, income protection for the displaced is necessary but not sufficient for the sustainable development of extractive regions, and the social and cultural costs of a hollowing community, together with the lagged effects on services and on the young, lie beyond what the quantitative record yet shows.