How nice to hear from you,
@Pelegrin. I was hoping that you would notice the thread and contribute some of your local knowledge.
Like numerous other pilgrims, I occasionally made comparisons between the structure of fields and villages along the Camino Francés and what I was familiar with from "home". I very much enjoyed looking at the green pattern of Galicia with what appeared to me to be smallish fields and meadows, neatly limited and separated from each other. Along a section of the Camino Francés in Castilla y Leon I noticed what appeared to me to be very large fields - I am bad at estimating, so I cannot say how many hectares they had. I wondered who owned them. A forum member helpfully sent me a link about
latifundios and
minifundios and I've tried to learn a bit more about this.
I grew up in a village of about 800 inhabitants. In the 1950s, nearly every family was a farmer family and of course they all lived in the village. Nowadays, there are perhaps about 3 full-time farmers left in the village who own or lease most of the agricultural land (including the one field that I have inherited
). Some land is still used by their owners who, however, have a different main job and work only in the evenings or on Saturdays on their land, or who are pensioners. Due to inheritance laws and/or traditions similar to what you describe for Galicia, individual fields had also been split many times at each succession and had become tiny and fragmented. In the 1960s, there was a large scale land reform that changed this. I understand that there have been similar attempts in parts of Spain, known as
Concentración parcelaria?