Breakdown of Hacía muchos años que el valle estaba deshabitado.
mucho
many / a lot
estar
to be (location/state)
el año
year
que
that / than
Questions & Answers about Hacía muchos años que el valle estaba deshabitado.
Why does this sentence use hacía and estaba instead of a past perfect translation for "had been"?
When you want to say that something had been happening for a certain amount of time (and was still happening at that past moment), Spanish uses the imperfect tense. The formula is hacía + [time] + que + [imperfect verb]. English uses "had been," but Spanish just shifts the present-tense formula (hace... que...) backward into the imperfect.
How would I change this to say "The valley has been uninhabited for many years" (up to the present)?
Why do we use estaba instead of era here?
We use estaba because deshabitado (uninhabited) describes a state or condition, not an inherent characteristic. Even though the valley was empty for many years, being uninhabited is a physical state, which always requires the verb estar.
Can I change the word order and put the time expression at the end?