Edition: U.S. / Global

Granadilla Journal; The Ghost of Old Spain Stirs and Welcomes Visits

Published: April 22, 1998

The towering stone castle defended this walled hilltop village for five centuries but it was no match for the Government, which built a large dam, flooded the surrounding farmland and made Granadilla a ghost town.

The last of the 1,000 residents left in 1965, when Granadilla still had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Pillagers then replaced villagers.

But in 1984 the Government resurrected the town, 180 miles west of Madrid, as a base for teaching urban high-school students about rural life. Since then, groups of students have come for a week at a time to cut wood, bake bread and tend animals. During breaks they scramble up the castle's narrow winding stairway to the parapet, to shout out to people below or to smoke cigarettes.

Granadilla is not typical of Spain's estimated 900 ghost towns. Most were dirt-poor villages that slowly bled to death starting in the 1950's as a majority of Spain's agricultural workers left for better-paying jobs in the burgeoning cities.

But lately a highly urbanized and far wealthier Spain, with a per capita income three times that of 1965, has been taking a new look at its ghost towns and several thousand other villages. The Granadilla program, once unusual, is now part of a trend to protect, and experience, rural life.

The signs of change are abundant. Ghost town property prices are rising. Various hamlets suffering population loss have offered cash incentives to retain families with young children. And hundreds of country inns in restored village buildings have opened in the 1990's, attracting tourists who want an alternative to Spain's often crowded Mediterranean beaches.

''People see something they lost; now these lands have sentimental value,'' said Carmen Ibanez, who teaches the students who visit Granadilla about traditional spinning and weaving, using wool from local sheep.

The purpose of the Granadilla program, said Jose Ramon Gonzalez, one of its directors, ''is not for people to return to live in the villages, but to know about their past.''

Yet some Spaniards are returning, at least to make second homes. Ms. Ibanez's father recently retired as a business executive in Madrid and lives part of the year in his nearly deserted native village in Castile.

Antonio Ruiz, a Madrid architect who was in Granadilla recently to supervise the renovation of a few buildings, said he had spent many weekends with his wife looking for a ghost-town house he could renovate.

''Forget the apartment on the beach, because it's massively overbuilt,'' said Mr. Ruiz, 36. ''People are looking for tranquillity and to feel what their grandfathers felt.''

He is learning, however, that tranquillity does not come cheaply. A house without a roof and with crumbling stone walls on a small plot of land could be bought for $1,000 in the early 1990's in ghost towns an hour or two from Madrid. Now, Mr. Ruiz said, it is hard to find the same kind of property for $13,000.

Seventy-five students in Granadilla were recently enjoying the fruits of ghost-town restoration. Since 1984 the Government has spent $5.5 million here to repair the city hall, the house once used by the local priest and 18 other buildings for use as classrooms, a mess hall or dorms, although dozens of structures are still in ruins.

The students come here only after their teachers won approval from the Government for lesson plans using the village theme. The students spruce up gardens, survey solar panels installed in the village and also discover the downside to village life.

''Don't go in there,'' warned Sonia Lopez, 15, from Guadalajara, pointing to the covered sheep pen. ''It smells. You'll faint.''

The invading Moors founded Granadilla in the ninth century and later lost it to the Christians, who built the castle in the 15th century. In 1955, the Government decided to dam the Alagon River in the valley below the village to generate electricity and irrigate distant fields of cotton and tobacco.

The completion of the dam in 1962 was the death knell for the village, which was taken over by the Government. But since 1984 Granadilla and two other restored ghost towns in northern Spain have been used by 80,000 students in the Government's village education program.

Granadilla is the largest of the three, and its graceful slate structures caught the eye of the Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar, who filmed the final scene here for his 1990 movie ''Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!'' In the movie a former mental patient played by Antonio Banderas comes searching for his boyhood home in a ghost town.

Many of the recent visiting students in Granadilla also had small-town roots, and spoke with pride about exploring the native villages of their parents or grandparents.

Yet despite the engaging lessons of Granadilla, few students expressed a desire to abandon urban comfort and move to a village, ghost town or not.

''I like the city more because I'm accustomed to the stores and schools,'' said Leticia Ribera, 15, who was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap bought in her provincial city of Ponferrada. ''For five days this is fine, but I wouldn't want to live here.''

Photo: The building of a dam turned Granadilla into a ghost town, but it has been resurrected. It and two other restored ghost towns have been used by 80,000 students in the Government's village education program. (Photographs by Al Goodman for The New York Times) Map of Spain showing location of Granadilla: Granadilla is being used to teach urban students about rural life.