How a forgotten Spanish province put itself back on the map

To be or not to be. That seemed to be the question for Teruel, a tiny province in south central Spain, and it looked like only a matter of time before a negative verdict would be rendered. Despite a capital handsome enough to merit designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the outlook was grim. A hundred years of population decline had shrunk the citizenry by more than 40 percent. The roads and railways were decrepit. Educational opportunities at the university level were limited and the healthcare infrastructure was third-rate. As more people abandoned the province to seek fortune elsewhere, the national government saw fewer reasons to shore up services for those who remained. To make matters worse, although the economy was depressed, technically the area was rich enough to be exempt from European Union development aid, which has flowed largely into Eastern Europe in recent years. Tourists weren't even coming, despite a landscape dotted with Moorish fortifications straight out of One Thousand and One Nights.
Teruel was being roundly ignored. So a group of citizens banded together with the determination to turn things around. Enough was enough. Following a brainstorming session, they rallied around a simple slogan, a motto invested with hopes of ressurection and phrased with perfect simplicity: "Teruel Exists." Bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters were printed up. They began to pop up here and there, confronting Spaniards with a curt, straightforward memo. Teruel Exists.
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It and any number of similar regions around the world have plenty to learn, and it just may start with figuring out how to produce news from an absolute vacuum. Before we parted ways, Juarez showed once again that Teruel Exists is the undisputed champion in that regard. As we bellied up to a nearby bar and ordered a round of beers, he picked up his cell phone and summoned a reporter from the Heraldo de Aragon, the state's biggest newspaper. Not long afterwards, she turned up, snapped a photo and asked me a few questions. Three days later, there it was on page 14, headline and picture and everything. "Teruel Exists [has received attention] from people in Finland, Germany, the Republic of Congo and two separate countries in South America," Juarez was quoted as saying, but word of the town had yet to spread to the United States.

At least, not yet. It would take a second story, filed a few thousand miles away, to accomplish that.
Trey Popp, Philadelphia-based reporter