The screeching of the mountains could already be heard as we reached the Atocha station. It was due to the felling of centuries-old Himalayan cedars in the center of Madrid, one of the cities that all climate models agree will suffer longer and more intense heat waves each year. For two months, large trees have fallen and, immediately, in the same place, they turn into sawdust before the eyes of citizens who have been mobilized for almost a year to try to prevent it.
These are the subway expansion works, specifically a line, line 11, transversal, which will link neighborhoods like a belt. They are affecting emblematic parks and green areas after a change in the original project that has generated a controversy that goes beyond the local level to become a matter of national politics and international repercussions.
The decision to cut down in a protected area, as it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, given that it has been part of the Landscape of Light with this title since 2021, has shown that the José Luis Rodríguez Almeida City Council, which authorizes the cutting, and the Community of Madrid, chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who plans them, consider it a priority to avoid problems with road traffic and technical issues that engineering experts consulted by residents of the affected areas consider solvable. In the first approved expansion project, the trees were minimally affected. Then came the review, and with it the number of affected trees went from 79 to about 1,200, although the numbers have varied in each official document. It was almost a year ago, in February 2023, when it was learned that the impacts had been moved from the streets to the parks, without a new environmental impact report.
The first news about this modification came from residents of the Madrid Río park in Arganzuela, when they saw a good part of the plane tree grove in the old Arganzuela park fenced off in February 2023, an area protected by the City Council itself. They discovered that they were going to eliminate about 300 60-year-old plane trees 15 meters high to make a station there that was planned under the asphalt. That gave rise to the first demonstrations of thousands of citizens to revert the situation to the original plan under the slogan “Metro yes, felling no.”
The mobilization has not stopped since then. For months, more than 90,000 signatures against logging were collected, 26,500 at street level and the rest digital; legal complaints were filed, still ongoing; the Ombudsman was appealed to; 355 allegations were presented, despite the fact that the deadline to do so opened at the end of July, in the middle of the holiday period; It even went to the European Parliament, where there is a commission investigating the case, given that much of the work is financed with funds from the European Investment Bank, known as the 'climate bank'.
“The lack of transparency from the beginning has been total. In all this time, we have been received by a Community Transport official and none from the City Council,” says Susana de la Higuera, spokesperson for the Pasillo Verde Imperial neighborhood association.
From the Community of Madrid, the technical reasons for the change of the works to parks are varied: in the case of the grove, problems with a channeling of the Canal de Isabel II and a high tension line, but it was discovered that the former passed through the same park and the second is affected in many works. Also in traffic conditions on a street that does not have it. “The only explanation is that it is easier for them to do the work by razing the park than to cut the street,” says Susana de la Higuera. “We have insisted a lot that we are not opposed to the subway, but that almost all logging could be avoided and they did not want to.”
Another change to the original project was to move the entrance of the tunnel boring machine from an access area to Madrid to Comillas Park, in the populous Carabanchel neighborhood, adjacent to a Primary school attended by 400 students. For this park, which has already been razed, there have also been massive protests against its felling and for the impact on the school center of a work of this size.
The last of the most controversial episodes has been, last week, the destruction of the aforementioned Jimena Quirós garden, in Atocha, where emblematic almost century-old cedars of more than 20 meters have succumbed. The requests to stop logging in that area of the UNESCO Landscape of Light, by the ministers of Culture and Ecological Transition, Ernest Urtasun and Teresa Ribera, respectively, have fallen on deaf ears. The fellings did not wait for meetings that had been scheduled to discuss the issue for January 30. Ribera has even announced that stricter general guidelines on the conservation of urban trees will be promoted, in collaboration with communities and municipalities, in order to prevent avoidable felling from happening again.
For their part, since the beginning of the mobilizations, Almeida and Ayuso hid behind another felling that had been requested by Adif, that is, the central government, to expand the Atocha station, which involved cutting down 246 trees. “It seems that there are trees on the left and right, depending on who does the work that causes the felling,” the mayor has pointed out every time he has been accused of being “tree-killing.” Finally, a few days ago the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, announced that only one tree would be cut down for these works, leaving them without arguments. The latest is that the mayor has returned to the fray with “trees according to ideology” talking about the felling of more than 2,000 trees to widen a lane outside the city, on the A5. The urban center has lost (not counting fellings since a year ago) more than 78,600 trees.
“But we have achieved a lot. Thanks to the mobilizations we have prevented the disaster from being even worse,” say the residents of the affected neighborhoods. After the continuous protests in the streets, with great media impact, it was possible to save more than half of the Arganzuela grove, some Atocha specimens in Jimena Quirós, trees on street sidewalks that they did not want to cut, Darwin Park along the which exited the tunnel boring machine and the Palestine park, where an electrical substation was located.
To achieve this, the continuous popular mobilization has been joined by the support of prestigious scientists, who even carried out citizen science studies in the areas already cut down, revealing the importance of tree shadows in large cities, sustainability experts, public works engineers (also metro) and even the architect of Madrid Rio, Fernando Porras-Isla. “Deep down, we have done their job, but the effort to save the trees is welcome,” says De la Higuera. And they have no signs of stopping: “We are going to continue forward until everything is restored in the best possible way, controlling what happens with the transplants that they said they would do and demanding a transparency that has not existed, not even in how many specimens were going to disappear. in areas like Jimena Quirós,” he points out.
They also want to keep an eye on what happens with the plantations that have been said to be done to compensate for the felling of trees in the center, which is believed to go to the so-called “Metropolitan Forest” on the outskirts, where there have already been plantations of small plants that ended up drying up last year due to lack of maintenance.
Regarding the last enclave cut down in Atocha, last week began with the dismissal of the municipal head of World Heritage, Carmen Rojas, an architect who was in charge of coordinating the candidacy of the Landscape of Light to UNESCO in 2021, the only one in the city in this coveted listing. She has not explained the reasons, but Rojas did not agree with the management she was taking of the place. Almeida even pointed out a few weeks ago that “it was an underground work” and that it would have no impact on the image to be transferred to UNESCO, but the images of the large cedar trees falling into pieces in just a few hours have gone around the country.
