We mostly talk about European cities, but what is your countryside like? How far are your neighbors, how far is the nearest store, how big is your property? It’s common to see stuff on Reddit about rural CAN/AUS/USA, but not much for Europe. I’m sure the answer will differ a lot between Belgium and Sweden for example.
13 comments
You’re probably never more than 2 or 3 miles from the nearest village/town/city. Houses in the country are sometimes a bit bigger than those in villages/towns/cities but rarely are they as big as the average house in an American city.
There’s only semi-rural places in Germany. You can easily go by bicycle in half an hour or less from one village to the next one, no matter where you are. Usually, each second or third village is actually a town and has all amenities that are not present in the surrounding villages.
Most people in those semi-rural parts of Germany actually live in villages. Single farmhouses or hamlets also exist but they aren’t too common.
Italian here. Italy is an “packed” country and unless you live in a small village in the mountains you ‘re likely to live at no more than 10 km (6 miles) from your the next village.
As a kid when i complained that we were living in the middle of nowhere as we have to drive 15 minutes to reach the next village where all the stores are my father would laugh and say
“If you were american you would have to drive at least 1 hour just to go to the bar for the coffee and you would think that its really close”
Very, but it depends on where you live in the country. 90 % of the population lives in the southern 1/3rd of the country. In some places up in the northern parts away from the coast, you have to drive for hours to get to the grocery store…
[Map of population density](https://www.scb.se/contentassets/f75993bfd749498d9303f164b0db8db6/har-bor-sveriges-befolkning.png)
Very poor public transportation, very few doctors and specialists, no mediatized association who will defend you, need to have a car in order to go to the university and military police patrols are the only state presence you will encounter at all
Norway gets pretty rural by European standards, but even here you wont be hours away from the next village typically. Standard up in the inland valleys are about 20-30km from the next village. There living 45 min from the nearest store isnt unheard of. The kids often have to move away for high school, so when they’re 15-16. Because there is none nearby.
You’ll often live quite far from what can be called a city though. Could easily be 5 hours from a city or major town in the most rural areas of the country.
There are people who live on random islands with no stores and no fixed links, thats suprisingly common if you look through random islands near the Norwegian coast. Thats probably about as rural as you can get.
The furthest you can be from any village is on Rottumerplaat, a tiny uninhabited island, where the closest village is 15 km away, on the German island of Borkum. The closest Dutch village is 20 km away.
I live in a village with less than 1000 people, next to a town with 8000. Surrounded by cows, chickens, pigs, tractors, dogs, cats, accordions, foxes, weasels, deer, gamsi (chamois), bees, hornets, all kinds of birds..
Village is on a small hill with an early 16th century church on top in the centre. My house is the second house from the church, that also has a graveyard with a view into valleys around it. Church is banging regularly, but not more than once per hour. I don’t hear it, it’s not a big bell tower and it’s behind another house, 100m away. We all have access to at least 100/20mbps (download/upload) internet with optical cable, but don’t know what the current ceiling is, I think I have the base package.
Closest grocery store is 1.6km away, two gas stations are 2km away. It’s all in the town, that has at least three other grocery stores, two or three libraries, garden shops, an open market for farmers to sell their children, courthouse, two elementary schools, bus to the city that drives around every 30min, with the city being about 40min away with the bus and 15min on the highway. It also has some small tech shops, pet shops, etc. normal town stuff.
If you want more rural, you can drive for maybe like 5min, by some fields that sometimes have cows, goats, sheep or horses, untill you either end up in a forest or on the outskirts of the next town/village.
It’s a country of villages. Villages and hamlets everywhere. Shops are another story. They are much less frequent.
It varies a lot. I lived for a few years in a “rural” place and was annoyed that I had to ride my bicycle 6 km to the nearest grocery store but we did have public transport several times a day, at least on weekdays and the nearest big city was only 13 km away. So nothing really.
On the other hand there’s a village called Sevettijärvi in northern Lapland that was in the news a few years ago when they were raising awareness of how they were losing their services after their post office closed and how far everything is, it’s now 120 km to the closest post office. The closest place to get emergency healthcare is in Norway 80 km away. Pharmacy is 150 km away. The closest place to give birth in is 470 km away. They have very bad mobile coverage. It’s 130 km to the closest ATM and 155 km to the closest state alcohol monopoly store but at least the closest grocery store is only 30 km away. In the article I found they interviewed a woman who had been born there (but who now lives in a slightly more connected village) and she had spent her high school years in a town of 60 000 (as obviously there’s no high school either) and hated living so close to other people. Sevettijärvi has a population of 350. Most of the inhabitants are [Skolt Sami](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skolts) who were evacuated there due to Finland losing the Petsamo area in WW2. They only got a road passable for cars in 1960s. In the Skolt Sami language the village is called Čeʹvetjäuʹrr.
Probably most rural places are villages in the mountains of Central/Eastern Slovakia.
Here most rural places are villages near the mountains or not near major route(between towns/cities), since they usually have worse public transport.
I live in the village that is sorta like crossroad, we got village on every side(N, S, E, W) and we are in the middle of the triangle between 2 towns and large city. All of them are 15km(10 minutes by car) and less from us and we got bus at least every hour(during rush hours sometimes even 3-4 buses per hour). By bus travel takes 20-25 minutes to nearby town and 30-35 minutes to nearby city, due to bus stopping 2-3 times in every village on the way.
Anyway my village is small, only little over 700 people. Recently there have been large influx of city people and a lot of houses were built in the last decade. Anyway there is not much here, only two employers are large corporate farm and local ISP. We got small grocery store(when I was kid we had 3), one pub(when I was kid we had 3), one small shop mainly with gardening stuff and food for animals, kindergarten, Roman Catholic Church(with cemetery ofc). Basically everything(besides kindergarten) including mayor’s office is in the middle of the village. We also used to have small Elementary school(grades 1-4), but it was closed due to lack of kids(when I was kid it was full).
I live on the longest street, few houses away from the end. All the older houses tend to have big properties(by local standards at least). Often 1500 or even over 1800 square meters like ours. Houses are generally quite small, little over 300 square meters. Some have garage, some don’t(we have garage and also small room near it where we got gardening tools, bikes and lawn movers), but most older houses have attic and and basement, both used for storage(attic for stuff you won’t use and basement mainly for veggies, tools etc…). We got front yard with small garden, backyard and “middle” yard connecting them(so we have no back door in the house). Ofc largest part of the property is the garden, which we use to grow fruits and veggies, but it’s too big for us, so more than half of it is grass with a lot of different fruit trees.
In comparison, most new houses are not actually bigger than older houses here and property they are on is often smaller than 400 square meters. So basically even garage is sometimes luxury for them. Also most don’t have basement, attic, garden or front/backyard ofc. But there are also big houses, mainly built in late 80’s and 90’s. These are those big multigen houses, that can have 2-3 families at once(For example our house feels crowded with 5 people), when I think about it, they feel quite similar to US houses, since their basements are a lot like US basement and in general are quite similar. Ofc they are built with bricks, concrete and steel, so that is major difference.
All houses have fences around whole property, besides end of the garden, which leads to the field. So fence in the front yard and dogs running around property are very common. Other thing is neighbours are quite close to each other, even closer than in the US suburbs. Ofc when new neighbours come, there is no welcoming committee with homemade stuff for them, heck if they are from city they usually won’t even introduce themselves.
Anyway like in every village/town you got tractors/trucks(big trucks not pickup) driving around all the time. Lot of birds everywhere, if you are lucky you will see deers, rabbits, pheasants or even fox. Most common crops on the fields in my area are wheat, rye, barley, canola, corn and sunflowers.
Sorry about the wall of text lol.
What a Danish person considers to be “rural” is obviously quite different from what our Scandinavian neighbours think. You are never more than around 5-10 kilometres (at absolutely most) away from some form of civilisation. I consider any town with a population of less than 50k to be “rural” in a sense, but that may just be because I grew up in the capital region.
One of the most popular tv-programs of recents decades here have actually been a program called *”*[der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MJECdTSyLg&ab_channel=MsAnne5)*”*.. Translate into something like *”where no one would believe someone could live”*. Program has been going on for years and in general show people living far away from the civilization. With the likes of 1 person being the sole inhabitant on an island or elsewhere.. or places you can’t reach with a car etc. So it can get quite rural if you want it.