Alicante residents and visitors have seen this week the new appearance of the Paseo de los Mártires de la Libertad, a four-lane road that runs between Paseo del Puerto and La Explanada, closed to traffic during July and August, despite protests from hoteliers and merchants. . The work has barely changed the use of the road – the four paved lanes have been maintained – now separated by a narrow median on which a row of palm trees has been planted.
The work has received criticism for being unambitious, and has also succeeded in time the reform that the Port Authority undertook last year in its part of the promenade, the closest to the waters of the inner dock. What both institutions have agreed on is expanding the already numerous presence of palm trees that characterizes the most famous Alicante promenade.
As explained yesterday by the Councilor for Parks and Gardens, the coastal façade that runs along the inner dock of the port is now around 500 specimens. The opening of the new road has incorporated 44 palm trees and another 38 trees of different species into its new median and other flower beds, which add to the more than a hundred specimens that were planted last year at the foot of the water and the 360 ??specimens of the Esplanade.
However, citizen platforms such as Salvem el nostre patrimoni or Unir Alacant are being very critical of municipal management in this field. The trigger was the pedestrianization of Avenida de la Constitución, next to the Teatro Principal, in which the council opted to replace the leafy melias that provided valuable shade to the neighborhood with young plane trees that will need time that humans do not have enough time to acquire a certain size.
Instead of attenuating, the controversy has grown as it transcended the fact that the melias, which were transplanted to a park near Playa de San Juan, have passed away. On the social networks of the neighborhood platform – where Mayor Barcala is nicknamed “Bartala” – there is talk of deception when it comes to selling “transplants” that later become “fellings”, and they report that “construction companies do not “There is no training, nor supervision of how trees are treated when works are carried out.”
And this summer, coinciding with the work on the coastal promenade, another of the busiest axes for pedestrians and vehicles has been built, which constitutes the Doctor Gadea, Federico Soto and General Marvá promenades, with numerous trees uprooted and oros pruned dramatically. It is enough to walk through the place to certify the doubts that the neighborhood has regarding the final result of the redevelopment of the area, since the experience of the nearby Avenida de la Constitución does not invite optimism.
The Alicante city council assures, however, that the uprooted trees are always replaced by others, and that, in fact, in the aforementioned axis more will be planted than those that existed when a traffic lane was eliminated, but the neighbors who oppose it They do so from the idea that “priority should be given to adult and mature trees in the streets.” “The tree is not a bench, it is not a lamppost,” they maintain.
It is true that in their criticism they agree with the left-wing opposition, but they clarify that it is not an ideological issue “or radical environmentalism”, it is “something from third grade.” The council argues that uprooted trees are always uprooted for some justified reason, due to their poor condition or because the reform of the pipelines makes it imperative.
To all this, councilor Manuel Villar responds with figures: The urban transformation works launched this summer include the planting of more than 570 new trees, Ayr said in a statement. “The new plantations give priority to traditional trees from the Spanish Mediterranean such as platanus hispanica or broad palm palms (Washingtonia and Livingstonia) to provide greater shade, in addition to providing color and originality with the Chinese soap trees (Koelreutieria Paniculata).” he explains.
The mayor assures that trees have been planted in streets that did not have them, such as Sevilla Street, where 38 specimens of Chinese Soap Trees and 128 bushes of the Viburnum Lucidum variety have been planted.
In its note, Parks and Gardens assures that the city of Alicante has 91,129 trees, which are distributed almost half between roads and green areas. Of them, 18,968 are palm trees and 72,161 trees are exemplary destinations. More specifically, the Tree Master Plan establishes that 60,215 tree positions have been inventoried on the city’s streets. It also stands out that 45 percent of the trees have a crown of between four and 6 meters, 25 percent of six to eight meters and 5 percent reach up to 10 meters of crown, with 19 percent of the trees having a crown less than four meters. As usually happens, time will give and take away reasons, and walkers will judge in the coming months whether the city has gained or lost from this process of tree reform.