Italian village offers €2,000 gifts to boost dwindling population

Bormida, population 394, also offering homes to rent for as little €50 a month in effort to persuade people to move there

The mayor of a remote mountain village in Italy is offering to pay €2,000 (£1,700) to anyone who moves there, in an attempt to save it from becoming a ghost town.

Those who take up residence in Bormida, which sits 420 metres above sea level in the north-west Liguria region and is home to 394 people, will pay as little as €50 a month in rent.

The enticing initiative is Mayor Daniele Galliano’s way of breathing life into a village whose population has dwindled in recent decades as young people leave to find work in the closest big city of Savona or beyond.

The finer details of the cash offer still needed to be ironed out and approved by the local council, Galliano wrote on his Facebook page. But if all goes ahead, from next year anyone who transfers their residence to Bormida and either rents or buys a property there will be gifted €2,000.

And under the low rent scheme, which should be in place within the next two months, a small property will cost just €50 a month while a more spacious one will be no more than €120.

“We’re still working out the plan, but anyone is welcome to come and live here,” said a local councillor, who asked not to be named. “We’re a small community but very welcoming. We’re high up in a mountain area but also not far from the sea – it’s a healthy lifestyle, the air is very clean.”

Galliano’s Facebook post was met with a flurry of responses from potential new inhabitants, with some saying they would renounce the cash gift in return for a job in the town.

“Mr Mayor, I’m available to move and give up the €2,000, but I can’t live off air. I have a family with two small children, if you can guarantee a job, even the most humble one, it wouldn’t be a problem,” wrote Amedeo Alloca.

But what is life like in Bormida? The manager of Oddone Giuseppe, one of the town’s four restaurants, said: “There is nothing much to do here. But life is so simple and natural, we have forests, goats, the church, and plenty of good food. Life would definitely be free of stress.”

A report last year by Legambiente, an Italian environmental association, found that 2,500 villages across the country risked being abandoned owing to depopulation.

In January the culture ministry named 2017 the “year of the village” as part of an attempt to promote tourism in places at risk of becoming deserted.

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