La Hiruela, Spain's last open council village, ends tradition: 88 residents

La Hiruela drops its open council: €573,000 for 88 residents

La Hiruela, a village of 88 inhabitants in the mountains near Madrid, is no longer the only municipality in the region governed by an open council (concejo abierto), a Spanish system where residents decide directly in assembly. For four decades, its residents settled everything in open meetings, from the allocation of communal pastures to a building permit. Now they will elect councillors and a mayor through the usual system, the one that turns a ballot paper into a blank cheque every four years. The change was presented as a modernisation. The figure almost nobody mentions is the other one: the municipal budget stands at €573,576. For 88 souls, that is nearly €7,000 per head.

What the open council was and why only one remained in Madrid

It is not a medieval relic outside the law, however much postcard-style chronicles tell it that way. The Spanish Constitution recognises it in Article 140, and the Local Government Basic Law develops it in Article 29. The 1978 electoral law applied it to municipalities with fewer than 25 residents and to those that already used it by tradition. It later became mandatory below 100 inhabitants, until Law 27/2013 on the rationalisation and sustainability of Local Administration removed that requirement.

Since then, establishing one requires three things at once: a request from a majority of residents, a two-thirds vote of the councillors and approval from the regional government. Spain once had more than a thousand municipalities under this regime. After the 2011 electoral reform, around 110 remained, nearly all in Castile and León, Castilla-La Mancha and Aragon. La Hiruela is no whimsical exception: it is the tail end of an old and rather silent process.

The €573,576 nobody wants to let go of

La Hiruela's budget stands at around €573,576, of which some €350,000 arrive as transfers from the State and the Community of Madrid. With 88 inhabitants, that is nearly €7,000 per resident. The figure unsettles the cosy narrative: we are not talking about a village that runs itself on pennies, but a half-million-euro operation that depends almost entirely on other people's money.

That is where the awkward objection comes in. It is argued that an open council lacks the counterweight that exists in a large town hall, where the opposition party scrutinises every contract because their salary depends on it. In a residents' assembly, the minority that loses a vote 45 to 43 has no public funding to organise protests or demand invoices. The winners decide. Others argue the opposite: the losers are still neighbours with names, houses and faces, and they organise without needing a party in charge of the public purse.

Local boss politics, the ghost that never leaves

The official argument for the change was population growth, from 54 to 88 inhabitants. The detail is that 88 is still below 100, and that after the 2013 reform the demographic threshold no longer decides anything: the regime is preserved by tradition and will. The request to declare La Hiruela intangible cultural heritage, filed by Más Madrid in the Madrid Assembly on 26 July, did not go ahead.

On local boss politics, both sides are suspicious. Some argue that party rule never solved it, and that joining the right party is enough to run the show with a third of the votes instead of convincing half the village. Others point out that the local boss is born not from the model but from the concentration of power and the privatisation of communal assets. There, exactly there, the analysis gets stuck.