Example of small town from "flyover state" in Denmark: i.e. area with very few jobs, very low house prices, everybody moving away, houses on the market forever. We call this for "the rotten banana" as the area is shaped as a banana and the economy is rotten.

Still very walkable and nice for kids.

Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less).

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533...

Is this a matter of preference or necessity? Median household net income in Spain is ~17K[0] and is probably much lower in rural areas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Barcelona is also a very walkable city (across the entire area of 2 million people, not just the very center) and is definitely the upper end of Spanish income.

A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles.

The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).

my rural area had twice the population but probably 10x the size. There was nowhere to "walk" to. We are talking about a 2-3 mile drive to the only "supermarket" in the town center, which was probably smaller than many modern corner stores. everything of interest was 2-3 miles away: the schools, the church, the liquor store, and that's really all there is (they did build a 99 cent store there, so that's neat).

It's not like the land was wasted with parking lots. It's just as generic a desert setting as you can expect. Hot, tumbleweeds everywhere, Sand as far as the eye can see in any direction, etc. It's all single home housing so it could be denser, but that's pretty much the only benefit of living there; I grew up with a half acre yard (full of sand and an awkward tree in the middle, but actual land) and it gave my grandparents some piece of mind when we went out to play.