CASTELNOU The school closed a decade ago and the beautiful, if dangerously crumbling, church shut its doors in January, but this tiny village in one of the most unpopulated and forgotten corners of Spain is making a brave attempt to stave off a slow death.

With just 109 inhabitants and an average age of 53, the village has already shrunk to a sixth of the size it reached at the height of its glory more than half a century ago. A third of those who remain are over 65.

“We'll probably all die here,” said 76-year-old Victor Lopez, as he sat with his friends on the bench they occupy daily in the village square. “Our own children all emigrated and there are only a handful of young people now. My generation grew everything from cotton to corn, but no one wants to work the land any more.”

As in many villages in this harsh, dusty corner of Teruel province, the fight for survival requires special measures. In an attempt to attract new inhabitants, Castelnou is now offering cheap houses, free land, an exemption from municipal taxes, and even a municipal babysitter to those families who wish to settle and bring children who might give the village a future.

This week, about 400 people travelled from all corners of Spain with their families to see what the village, tucked into a rocky hillside and surrounded by abandoned olive groves, had to offer. As the streets teemed with children for the first time in decades, elderly neighbours recalled fondly how it had been in their own youth.

“We need the young here. They bring joy,” said pensioner Sara Galicia.

It was a meeting of the needy and the desperate. As a makeshift car park beside the ancient stone bridge across the thin trickle of the River Martin filled up with cars from around Spain, family after family told the same story - of the struggle to find work and raise a family in a country where one in five people are jobless.

“I used to work installing aluminium windows but now there is no construction and I've been out of work for two years,” said Argentinean immigrant Rafael Gonzalez, who arrived in Spain six years ago.

Rafael and his wife, Andrea, brought their daughter Valentina on the two-hour drive from Terrassa, an industrial suburb of Barcelona hit hard by unemployment. Their determination to find a better future would, they said, overcome the difficulties of living in a place with some of the most extreme weather in Spain.

“The village is nice,” said Valentina, seven, as the thermometer soared above 38C. “But all the things in the playground were so hot that I couldn't touch them.”

“We fry in the summer,” admitted Lopez. “And the winter is freezing. Then everyone stays indoors - like snails in their shells.”

The “children's caravan” - which was greeted with a playground of bouncy castles and a free paella lunch for 500 people - was the idea of mayor Jose Miguel Esteruelas. Where other Spanish villages threatened with extinction have brought caravans of single women to meet the local farmers, Mayor Esteruelas decided to bring in children.

“Our aim is to bring both young people and businesses.” Already, he said, there were plans for a campsite, a factory making modular homes and a small textile workshop.

Those who bring both a child and a business plan will go to the top of the queue, he explained. Some 500 families had sent proposals. “We want enough children to make it worth opening the school again,” the mayor explained.

A family from Madrid quickly snapped up one of the houses that, with the help of grants, have been rehabilitated for potential newcomers. “They had a walk around the town and by midday they already had a house. We are offering free land to those who want to build their own,” said Esteruelas.

Castelnou has bravely given itself the logo of “the place where things happen”, but the opposite could be said to be true. The doctor visits only once a week and the priest now says Sunday Mass in the surgery.

“I would pay people to come and live here, especially in the winter when no one visits,” said villager Florencio Lucea, 83. Other villages in Teruel have done that, buying air tickets for immigrants with large families to travel from Argentina.

Javier Rodriguez and his wife, Anissa, got their children, Alex, eight, and Oriol, three, out of bed at 4.30am to drive the 418km from Roses, north-east Spain, to Castelnou. Crucially, they brought not just children but a plan to set up an ironmonger's workshop.

“Things are bad everywhere,” said Anissa. “You have to look at all the opportunities.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service