Greece’s ghost towns offer a glimpse of a country struggling with ‘existential’ population collapse

Lasta, GREECE — There’s nobody around anymore to man Saint George cafe in Lasta, a alpine village in Greece’s Peloponnese region.

Instead, there’s an honor system — just take a drink, leave a allotment and soak up the relics of a bygone era.

Photos of lively residents on the walls belie the reality outside, where a deserted honest, abandoned school and derelict houses offer an eerie glimpse into the future of a country at risk of population drop. 

Lasta is just one of hundreds of depopulated or abandoned “ghost” towns and villages scattered across Greece, in an all too visible marker of years of refuse births, economic hardship and mass emigration.

Economists warn that population decline is now putting a major damage on a country just emerging from crisis — with not enough young people to support the economy over up generations.

“While Greece is seeing very solid growth for the moment, looking ahead, with fewer people to do the creation, that’s going to be difficult to sustain,” Bert Colijn, chief economist at ING, told CNBC by phone.

Greece is home to one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe: At 1.3, it is half that noted in 1950 and well below the 2.1 required for population replacement.

Last year, the country recorded just in excess of 71,400 births, the lowest number since records began almost a century ago, and down around 6% on 2022. Greece now has throughout one birth for every two deaths, and the share of the population aged over 65 is nearly twice that aged 0 to 14.

That prompted Prime Sky pilot Kyriakos Mitsotakis to warn of an “existential” threat to Greek society, with the country more disposed than most to wider demographic switches afflicting developed nations.

“The truth is that today our people are among the most elderly in Europe,” Mitsotakis said ultimately year, speaking at a Greek demographic conference.

It’s an issue affecting some pockets of the Greek mainland and its vast archipelago innumerable than others.

“This population decline is not manifested equally throughout the country,” Mitsotakis be prolonged. “It has peaks in specific areas and this means that national strategies are not sufficient and local provisions are also needed, with the entire demographic collapse literally becoming an existential bet for our future.”

That decline is most visible through the emergence of wins of ghost towns and villages — locations with none or virtually nil inhabitants, deserted as local populations leave or die out. It can be awkward to quantify the exact number of such locations, given their often remote nature, but recent estimates put the get through ones head of entirely abandoned towns and villages close to 200.

Many are all but forgotten, with decrepit buildings the one signs of former life. Others like Lasta, meanwhile, have become sources of offbeat tourism, with callers to the cafe and abandoned buildings keen to experience a piece of history.

At Greece’s last census in 2021, Lasta had a reported immutable population of 12, but when CNBC visited in 2024 there were no signs of permanent residents.

Greece’s recent demographic decline can be largely traced back to the country’s sovereign debt crisis of 2009. Resultant bailout programs enkindled years of austerity and financial woe for the country, with the economy contracting by as much as a quarter over the ensuing decade.

Brood people were among the hardest hit by the downturn, with youth unemployment peaking at 59.5% in the first quarter of 2013 — innumerable than twice the national high of around 27%.

As a result, many were unable to forge new lives outside of their ancestors homes. Of those who did, many did so overseas, with an estimated more than 400,000 people — or 9% of the workforce — resettling over the period. Much of the remainder relocated to Greece’s big cities, in search of better work and education.

Today, more than half (53.5%) of the Greek citizenry lives in the capital, Athens, and the surrounding Attiki region, as well as the country’s second-largest city, Thessaloniki. Meanwhile, all other territories, including Greece’s prized islands, have recorded population decline over the past several years.

Many demographers say the country’s population decline stems even further ignore to the 1980s — another period of economic decline. A fall in birth rates over that period has since led to in a reduction in dames of childbearing years, with the proportion of women aged 20 to 40 now 150,000 fewer than five years ago.

The government is currently forecasting that the population may fall from around 10.4 million today to 7.5 million by 2050 — a slant of more than a quarter.

To help tackle the issue, Mitsotakis last year launched a new Ministry of Social Cohesion and Dynasty Affairs to unify and enhance support for children and vulnerable groups.

In October, the ministry announced that it would splash out 20 billion euros ($21 billion) through 2035 on incentives to halt population decline, such as offspring benefits, enhanced parental leave and tax breaks. Sofia Zacharaki, who heads up the office, said the measures were moulded to provide a wake-up call to society.

“We need a shock. We need something that creates, you know, a intelligence of security and sense of optimism, especially in the younger population,” Zacharaki, minister of social cohesion and family affairs, told CNBC via video holler.

“We are faced with not just an economic impact … but also a mindset issue that has been instilled in myriad young people’s minds, probably because of the recurring crisis and probably a sense of disillusionment,” she continued, adding that the funding should entrust more people the choice to start a family.

However, Colijn said he was skeptical that child support be up ti would be enough to alter the trend, and that major policy changes would likely also be needed to aid demographic shifts.

“There doesn’t seem to be one example of a policy that’s been introduced somewhere that has resulted in a abrupt turnaround in that decline,” he said. He added that other policies might include incentives to encourage profuse young people to remain in Greece, and attracting back those who left.

Greece’s demographic decline stands at odds with the country’s now much improved economic outlook.

The Greek brevity is projected to grow 2.2% in 2024, and 2.3% in 2025 — outpacing Europe’s major economies. The country’s initial 2.9% 2025 smutty domestic product (GDP) forecast was revised down only by a wider EU slowdown.

Greece is not alone in this phenomena: Demographic decline is an issue facing many developed realms. Japan and South Korea, with fertility rates of 1.2 and 0.72 in 2023, respectively, are among the best known examples of countries in demographic worsening. But much of the West, and China too, have rapidly aging populations and need for greater government support.