The article starts with an analysis of the national politics implicit in the España vacía debate, arguing that its vision of a unified Spanish territory marked by urban–rural tensions acts as a new imaginary of consensus. In parallel, it argues that the national politics of the España vacía debate relegate to invisibility the historical specificities of regions such as Galicia, whose traumatic process of rural dispossession has shaped both culture and politics in the region to the degree that Galicia’s traumatic relationship with the disappearance of its rural ecosystem constitutes the “traumatic unconscious” of contemporary Galician culture. To substantiate this claim, the article will offer new readings of three key works in contemporary Galician culture, focusing on reservoir building and hydropolitics. Chus Pato’s poetry book A ponte das poldras (1996, 2006), Enrique Otero’s film Crebinsky (2011) and César Souto and Luis Avilés’s documentary Os días afogados (2015) are read here as critiques of Galicia’s traumatic rural-to-urban transformations in the second half of the twentieth century. These works’ commentary on the experiences of forced displacement of Galician rural populations during Francoism, as well as their engagement with questions such as language and belonging, encapsulates the complex relation between rural dispossession, identity, violence and trauma that state-led debates on España vacía can camouflage.