Operation save the trees. Barcelona City Council is fine-tuning its device to stop the death of specimens resulting from the drought. Today the city has about 250,000 trees and palms of 487 species, and at the moment the City Council is irrigating in one way or another around 85,500. This is one of the biggest municipal challenges in recent times. Barcelona's groundwater distribution system barely reaches 20% of the city's green areas and with tanker trucks and vans it does not reach everywhere either.
In all their life here, the trees and palm trees were only watered during their first four years of life. And then they always managed on their own, with the water from precipitation and underground water. A thousand botanists, gardeners, tree managers, conservation specialists and other technicians from the Parcs i Jardins institute are studying an unprecedented scenario in these latitudes. It has not rained as needed since the spring of 2020. And in the last ten months, about 2,000 birds have already died due to the drought.
We were in Barceloneta park a few mornings ago. The rains of recent weekends refreshed the atmosphere, greened the battered grass, and invited the children to jump over the puddles. But that was nothing more than a mirage. Those precipitations barely penetrated the ground. Perhaps they reached 10 centimeters deep, in some points maybe 20. But the subsoil is still dry, hardened, barren. The roots continue to suffer.
The situation is so worrying that, if the land is not enriched now, this summer, when temperatures soar, it will become catastrophic. Nobody knows how many will die then. In the face of heat and drought, trees slow down their activity in order to save water, so much so that they can collapse. Heat and drought can soon unleash a deadly perfect storm. Operation Save the Trees is a race against the clock, the thermometer and the elements.
The problem is that Barcelona's groundwater distribution network still does not reach all corners of the city. Of the 85,500 trees that the City Council is watering against the clock, only 17,000 benefit from this system. Hence, the City Council is also using these days tanker trucks with capacities of up to 20,000 liters in those places with adequate access. Before the state of exceptionality, only a dozen of these vehicles worked. At the moment there are 14 in the morning, 22 in the afternoon and another 10 at night. This is how they water some 45,000 trees.
And up to 46 vans with tanks of just under a thousand liters go to tighter places, such as Diagonal Avenue, Francesc Macià Square, Barceloneta Park... in order to take care of another 23,000 copies. These shortcomings will be alleviated somewhat next year. The City Council is investing 14.4 million euros to improve its groundwater distribution system so that during 2025 the available volume will increase by 20%. We are talking about about 200 million liters per year.
Cristina Vila and Francesc Jiménez, director of the Barcelona Water Cycle and manager of Parcs i Jardins, say that after the previous drought the City Council did not stop investing in this network. In a normal situation, Barcelona used about three cubic hectometers of water for irrigation. Of them, 2.5 were potable and the rest were groundwater. Imagine a block in Eixample the height of the W hotel. Well, roughly speaking, that volume amounts to an hm3.
And then, in an exceptional situation, consumption was reduced by 57.7% and became 1.27 hm3, 0.90 of potable water and 0.37 of groundwater. At the beginning of February, the Generalitat established phase 1 of the drought emergency. Since then, the restrictions imposed only allow the City Council to carry out survival irrigation, the minimum possible, and only with groundwater, with water that is neither drinkable nor can be made drinkable. So currently consumption is reduced by 71%, and is 0.87 hm3/year of water that people cannot drink.
In the Barceloneta park, gardeners water most of the trees with hose in hand, especially profusely those in the garden areas and more discreetly those erected on the asphalt. This is not an arbitrary procedure. They say that those in the garden areas benefited for decades from the irrigation of the grass and bushes, and in a certain way they became comfortable. The others, those planted on the asphalt, had to wake up and develop their roots much more, and now they face the drought in better conditions. Some need more watering than others.
And these days gardeners pay close attention to their leaves, and also their bark, to see how each one reacts. This is a tree-lined attention. The City Council has a file for each city in the city, and all its vicissitudes are recorded there. And with all these observations, the technicians these days adjust the frequency and intensity of watering each specimen, those in the Barceloneta park and also those in the rest of Barcelona. Poplars and other riverside species accustomed to growing next to rivers require water at least once a week, while holm oaks barely need watering once a month.
“We have only been with the new procedures for three weeks – municipal technicians, Vila and Jiménez, abound. “We are still analyzing the reactions of the trees in this new scenario.” Because every detail counts. A good part of the trees found on the roads leading to the sea are in better condition than those on the roads from Besòs to Llobregat. And the thing is that for some the old streams went down, and for others they did not.
“We hope that in two or three weeks the situation will be clearer,” continue Vila and Jiménez. Then we can see if we have to make sacrifices or not. The moment is exceptional, and we don't know how the trees will react. We are watering specimens that we had never watered, enriching their subsoil so that they resist the approaching summer. Most likely, we will have to adjust the frequency and intensity of these irrigations. Furthermore, the sources that provide us with groundwater are changing. We analyze them every 15 days to check the evolution of their salinity, to see if we have to resort to others. In any case our goal is to save all the trees in Barcelona. “Everyone who dies hurts us a lot.”
The City Council estimates that in the last ten months about 2,000 birds died due to the drought. In principle, everything indicates that water stress was the cause of most of these deaths. But drought is to trees what the Covid pandemic was to people. Many are dying because the lack of water left them so weak that they cannot face fungi and diseases that they would have been able to overcome in a normal situation. In addition, more than 700 date palm trees were cut down after one of them fell and killed a person in the Raval this summer. Many of the felled palm trees were in good condition, but in the context of the drought they raised many concerns. In the end, safety took precedence.
At this moment the gardeners are especially pampering the older specimens, because they have already grown and lengthened those branches that provide so much shade, that mitigate so many noises, that oxygenate us so much... Because the trees are part of the heritage of this city, because the They make it a much friendlier and more livable place. And if they do not take care of them now, but pamper them in this delicate situation, people will discover what it really means to live in a city of concrete. If we lose the trees it will take a long time to recover them.
