Feature: Spain's San Sebastian tries to recover talent from citizens living abroad

Spain's northern city of San Sebastian is trying to reverse its brain drain by introducing a program that offers funding to those who want to return to the city.

"We thought it was important to try and have this talent back," Ernesto Gasco of San Sebastian city council told Xinhua.

"People who have been abroad for 10, 15, 20 years and have acquired so much knowledge, skills and new contacts have the opportunity to come back," said Gasco, who is the city's councillor of economic development, commerce, hospitality and tourism.

Over the past five years, a total of 420 people from San Sebastian went abroad on scholarships to develop their career. However, the city wants to recover this talent which contributes to make San Sebastian a hub of technology and innovation in Spain.

"We studied all these young people who left over the last five years and close to 80 percent of the 1,000 who are abroad now want to come back," Gasco explained.

As many as 60 percent of those people are working, 25 percent have scholarships, and the rest are looking for a job abroad, Gasco explained. The city has a large number of high-level graduates: one in 37 people from San Sebastian is a researcher.

Three researchers came back thanks to the returning program. Thirty-four-year-old Jon Maiz is one of them. Returning from Bordeaux and now working at Polymat, the Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering, he is involved in a project on how to recover electric energy from the sea.

"People who leave always have the idea of coming back and, in the end, you need funding if you want to come back. The returning talent program gives you that, so you can come back home and do what you love, which in my case is researching," he explained to Xinhua.

The brain drain in Spain has been an especially harsh reality since the economic crisis hit the country. In addition to this, the city of San Sebastian was seriously affected by terrorism with separative group ETA killing close to 100 people there.

However, the current climate of peace is helping boost several economic sectors such as tourism and, since 2000, the number of research centers have significantly increased.

The city has an unemployment rate of nine percent, down from 12 percent in the last two years, and well below the Spanish average, which stood at 18.6 percent in 2016. Endit