A sizeable share of the Europeans think of Spain as that dry and sunny country, but a part of it (in fact small in relative terms) on the Atlantic shares its landscape and climate with zones as French Britanny or Tasmania. On that area, from Galicia on the Portuguese border to the Basque Country on the French border, there is also a tradition of isolated individual homes on a small scale parcel base.

Here it is common to see that the traditional “sprawl” dynamics are reinforced today by the car. It is not strange to see people working in the cities and also cultivating their land as complement for their own use (but it is much less common for the newcomers). The problem is as much in the delay between residential growth and the effective provision of urban services, as in the persistence of a rural road network not adapted to increased traffic.