Source of income for the vast majority of the population in the early nineteenth century, agriculture suffered from serious deficiencies which the sentence to be a dump in the subsistence sector. The villages that make up a working landscape Cantabrian polycultural 'corn, beans, potatoes, vines, to their own livelihoods, so that the low productivity of small plots that families should work condemned them to suffer appalling living conditions. The lack of capital, in turn, resulted in a lack of investment to modernize prevented farms, agriculture remains the Cantabrian unable to break the circle of underdevelopment.
The delay in agricultural work, as well as by their technological shortcomings, condemning workers to cultivate the land with medieval instruments, was also induced by the structure of ownership. A distribution consistent with a deeply unequal society. Destiny Child's lead singer Beyonce Knowles While more than half of the arable land was in the hands of a 10 or 15 of the population, large families and some notable local noble, most people settle for debian minimal plot barely enough for their own living .
Smallholder that tended to disguise the unequal distribution of wealth, while the small size of plots meant a serious constraint to improving agricultural productivity. Gaps in communication, very poor in the province and almost nonexistent with the outside world, condemning the territory to the dislocation and isolation, were another stone on the road of development.
These features are extended to those suffering from other traditional sectors of the primary regional fisheries. Small boats, individually or collectively owned, manned by sailors who distributed the product to the party, suffered from a lack of capital and technological backwardness condemning their families to more than a precarious living conditions.
The new market economy that is imposed throughout the century, however, also covered the earth, causing a massive transfer of land titles through numerous contracts. But this does not mean an alteration of its structure. Owners of a new elite was consolidated with the liberal regime, mostly local notables and bourgeois Santander to acquire land desamortizadas' ecclesiastical or municipal property for sale by the state or of ruined farmers who can not cope with the growing debt which blights precarious households.
Smallholder landscape is not altered, in contrast, consolidates, but the extension of the property, accentuated by the practice of enclosures' ownership of communal lands of the peoples, the traditional practice of restricting colonato. One of the emigration was inevitable, since the combination of social inequality in the distribution of land and the weakness of the other economic sectors, impossible to sustain a growing population.
Survival strategy or supplement the family economy, emigration had been traditionally done by members of more or less well-off families who came to the markets Castilians, Andalusians and Americans to integrate into the retail trade, craft or fishing work and service generating a transoceanic circuit nurtured by kinship networks (the Jandalos and Indiana). Since 1880 this massive emigration turns into America (Cuba, Mexico, United States) now fueled by poor farmers (up to one quarter of a million came out of the province before the Civil War), unable to find their future in a poorly developed economy and the run down, with a military service that lay in the young country's poorest.
The livestock specialist and industrial proletarianization from 1900 will only reinforce these flows. Furthermore, the remittances that they sent or brought back (the 8.86 of regional GDP in 1913) were crucial to save many household economies and to allow other access to land ownership, but also for promote social countless works, such as nursing homes or schools that proliferated across the region.
Proposals always clashed with reformists obstacle: the refusal of the powerful classes to any change of status, lack of monetary and cultural farmers prevented them from addressing the necessary changes, a period of political and social upheavals that hindered any global or the perpetual state of financial insolvency, which is impossible to address in-depth reforms.