Patones de Arriba, Spain  - On weekends, files of parked cars form at the entrance to Patones de Arriba (Upper Patones), a mountain village 60 kilometres north-east of the Spanish capital Madrid.

Trendily dressed visitors stroll through the winding cobblestone streets, marvelling at the quaint stone slate houses and having lunch in elegant restaurants with crisp white table cloths and flames crackling in fireplaces.

A woman stops to photograph a stray cat sitting next to a flower pot. Many of the tourists also buy honey and cakes to take back to Madrid.

"On long weekends, thousands of people can come" to the village with about 20 permanent residents, says Antonio Contreras, a local artist who has studied the history of Patones de Arriba and written a book about the village.

Ninety-year-old Crisanto Araujo Garcia, who spent his childhood in Patones de Arriba, can hardly believe the metamorphosis the village has gone through.

"Life in Patones used to be like slavery," he recalls.

"There was no running water or electricity. We wore shabby clothes. I hardly went to school at all. I guarded sheep, hunted rabbits and worked as a forest guard. Nobody would have wanted to visit Patones, but now tourists even come from abroad," Araujo says.

The transformation of Patones de Arriba is typical of many Spanish villages which are coming back to life after an exodus to the cities left thousands of them practically abandoned in the 1950s and 60s.

People are still moving away from rural areas, but city dwellers in search of a more authentic lifestyle have also begun settling in villages which only had a few elderly residents left.

Hundreds of villages are trying to attract young residents with incentives such as job offers, cheap housing or the construction of a school.

"Villages represent a culture which can go back a millennium, and are essential for the preservation of the territory and for food production," environmentalist Jesus Garcia told the daily El Pais.

Patones de Arriba was founded in the 16th century by a family of shepherds with the surname Paton, and later became known for having leaders called kings who even had contacts with the Catholic hierarchy and the royal palace.

However, life was harsh in the village where people shared houses with their farm animals. Donkeys carried wheat from fields lower down, where the terrain was less hilly and farming easier.

In the late 19th century, the number of Patones residents increased to more than 1,000 at a time when the construction of a nearby dam drew workers to the village, according to Contreras.

Yet by the 1960s, nearly everyone had moved down to the new village of Patones de Abajo (Lower Patones) because of the better farmland and access to the outside world.

"Only one woman stayed in Patones de Arriba," Araujo recalls on a bench on a sunny square in Patones de Abajo.

When hippies discovered Patones de Arriba in the 1960s and 70s, most of the village was in ruins.

Its closeness to the capital helped to rescue it and turn it into a tourist attraction boasting about 15 restaurants, a hotel and two hostels, an art gallery and stylish shops.

Affluent Madrid residents and foreigners from other European countries have restored crumbling buildings as secondary residences, turning Patones de Arriba into a classy weekend resort with a price level similar to that in Madrid.

In the same way, other abandoned villages have begun recovering with projects ranging from craft workshops to farming cooperatives.

Some of the new village residents soon return to cities, but others grow accustomed to rural life.

"I enjoy the peace and clean air," says Francisco Parres, who bought a former hay loft in Patones de Arriba four years ago.

The Madrid lawyer now spends almost every weekend at the house, where the traditional whitewashed walls and dark roof beams mingle with computers, an electric fireplace and decorative objects from all over the world.

Critics say tourism is turning villages into rural theme parks, and Parres admits that Patones de Arriba has become a "completely artificial" place.

"But it is beauty that matters, not how it was created," he says. (dpa)