L'atles de la nova ruralitat /An Atlas of New Rural Life, which was presented on the 10th June in the Víctor Siurana Room of the Rectorat building, highlights an increasing appreciation of the rural way of life, a phenomenon that has inverted the process of depopulation that had prevailed for decades. Small villages have registered a demographic and social recovery, primarily due to factors like immigration, the improvement of road networks and the status of county capitals as towns. While there were 784,000 towns with less than 5,000 inhabitants in Catalonia in 2001, this amount rose to 799,000 towns in 2008.