Latvia’s population is 30% smaller than it was in 1990 and by 2050 numbers will be in decline in over half of Europe’s 52 countries
When Margarita Skangale was a teenager in the late 1970s, there were 1,200 pupils in Viļāni high school. When her son was young, the queue outside the children’s clothes shop – assuming, this being the Soviet era, it had any stock – stretched down the street.
Today, there are 400 pupils in the school and of her now 35-year-old son’s class of 26, just four still live in this small town in Latvia’s eastern Latgale region, three hours’ drive from the capital, Riga, and a little over an hour from the Russian border.
