This Tuesday is a very gray day for the No to logging movement in Madrid.
Spirits are very low in the organizational groups on WhatsApp, where the neighbors who have taken part in the demonstrations to save the trees that are going to fall due to the extension of metro line 11 watch the videos that a neighbor, Marta, is watching.
In the images, workers hired by the Department of Transportation cut down four Himalayan cedars in the Jimena Quirós Garden.
Marta is one of the few neighbors who has come to see, and above all to record, how the oldest and tallest trees fall from the entire list of trees that are going to fall due to the construction of the railway line and that the Madrid City Council has authorized.
“I always thought that the cedars would be saved,” says Azucena, a neighbor who has been fighting against logging since the movement began almost a year ago.
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For the neighbors, it was unthinkable that they would cut down the trees in the Jimena Quirós Garden and the Paseo de la Infanta Isabel.
They are large-scale specimens necessary to counteract all the pollution and noise that characterizes the Atocha station area, one of the busiest points in Madrid.
Also because they are part of the Landscape of Light, the only space in the capital declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a title it achieved only three years ago.
To approve the modification of any element of the Landscape of Light, a heritage report needs to be prepared and sent to UNESCO, as commented two weeks ago by the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, representing the interests of the global organization.
Thus, UNESCO can provide alternatives that are less harmful to the environment to carry out the work.
Urtasun sent a letter to the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, and the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to schedule a meeting to discuss the matter.
“The meeting was scheduled for next week, but we are going to try to change it to this Tuesday, urgently, due to the information published,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture.
The meeting is late for the cedars and shade trees in rows that have already been cut down.
The Department of Transport, the executor of the works, has assured on several occasions since February 2023 that they had studied the project and that the trees would be affected to the least possible extent.
When the works began, the proposal of the Community of Madrid was to cut down 1,027 trees and transplant nearly 500. After the tireless fight of the affected neighbors, they have modified that figure up to three times and the current proposal is to cut down less than the half that initial figure.
The neighbors who have pushed the Department of Transport to modify the project criticized that the criteria for carrying out the work prioritized not cutting off traffic before saving the trees.
The result of this criterion was to place the exit ramps for the trucks that remove the excavated earth on the sidewalks instead of on the road.
In the case of Atocha, the neighbors defend that the trees that were cut down last Monday on Paseo de la Infanta Isabel could have been saved, temporarily cutting the bus lane.
In the case of the Jimena Quirós Garden, the only alternative to save the trees was to change the construction method and carry out a mine excavation, a method that can be dangerous for the workers and a proposal that the Community of Madrid has not agreed to. accessed.
“We can't do anything about that,” says Alicia Estefanía, one of the promoters of the neighborhood movement against logging in Atocha.
Although the loss of trees in Comillas, Madrid Río, Palos de la Frontera, Atocha and Conde de Casal has caused the No to Logging movement to lose muscle, the residents' fight is now concentrated in the Comillas neighborhood, in the Carabanchel district, which is the most affected area.
The neighborhood park has looked like a wasteland for just over a month after the felling of more than 150 trees.
The family association of the school that borders the park, the Peru public school, and the Comillas neighborhood association, have joined forces to demand that the Community of Madrid not follow its plan to install the tunnel boring machine that will excavate the entire route of the line in that space.
The neighbors refuse to accept that more than 500 children under 12 years old will be studying for at least four years with a work of such magnitude less than 100 meters away.
In the rest of the stations they can only record how they cut down the trees in order to demonstrate what the Department of Transport and the Madrid City Council have done with the capital's tree mass.
This material, according to the neighbors, will be useful if any of the complaints filed by the neighborhood associations and Ecologistas en Acción go ahead and the work is declared illegal.
Or if the European Investment Bank, which finances much of the work and is also known as the Climate Bank for the projects it finances, agrees with the neighbors, who believe that the entity could withdraw the investment.
“We will all pay the fine,” says another neighbor.
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