The residents of Tablada prepare to give battle against Defense for the felling of 389 trees in the neighborhood

At noon, the few people who defy the heat and dare to cross the Tablada neighborhood in Seville, heading for the Barrio de los Remedios, choose Calle del Aeródromo to take shelter under the dense shadows projected by their cinnamon trees.

Between its dense branches, which almost shake hands from pavement to pavement, sparrows and swifts also take refuge, chirping in the heat.

This is one of the avenues with the most trees in the area, but soon that leafy shade could be replaced by another less extensive and dense one, belonging to younger species or another type of tree, or directly by the sun's rays, if it comes out forward the project prepared by the Defense Housing, Infrastructure and Equipment Institute (INVIED),

The project establishes the actions to improve a neighborhood that the State built in the mid-fifties of the 20th century for the use of the Armed Forces and whose homes - semi-detached houses for officers and blocks of flats for non-commissioned officers - have been acquiring the military.

However, the 93,000 square meters of land are owned by the Ministry of Defense and redevelopment by that department is the preliminary step for the City Council to receive it and take care of its maintenance.

The INVIED document includes the felling of 389 trees, 80% of the 531 inventoried in the Tablada neighborhood.

"Within the previous actions, the removal of 353 existing trees is contemplated, either due to their condition or as a consequence of the new road planning",

Although residents have spent decades demanding that the City Council take charge of the maintenance of a neighborhood where there is hardly any pavement and many of the basic service facilities, such as power lines or collectors, either do not exist or are obsolete, many are not willing to that this be done at the expense of the green lung of the area, some trees that provide shade and coolness in a Seville where the whip of heat whips harder and harder.

“The neighborhood is abandoned, there is no sidewalk, the signs are not respected, but we do not want meaningless trees to be cut down,” says Francisco Cano, an 83-year-old retired military man who has lived in Tablada throughout various stages of his career. life until settling down permanently after retirement.

allegations

He is one of the fifty neighbors who have signed one of the several allegations to the Defense project that have been presented to the Seville City Council to make modifications to the study and prevent what they consider to be "an arboricide" from being perpetrated.

The promoter of this collection of signatures is Pedro González, who has been living in Tablada for 40 years and who warns about the indiscriminate felling that has already been done in its streets in recent years without being replaced and of which he has an exhaustive count that has presented in the document before the Town Planning Department of the Seville Town Hall.

"Over the years, we neighbors have been seeing how they are cut down little by little and nobody, except for us, has ever replaced them," he says.

According to his tables, in this time 42% of the neighborhood's tree mass would have been lost.

The trees that grow in Tablada were planted in the mid-1960s.

Neighbors acknowledge that some are in poor condition and should be cut down, but not all.

The NGO Not one tree less, which has also joined the neighborhood claim together with the Guadaíra Live Park Association, Ecologists in Action, Seville Network for Climate and Ben Baso, has included in its allegations a technical study carried out by staff who concludes that only 10% of the trees should be felled.

"The INVIED project is based on a visual report that makes no sense, no rigor, no justification," says Valle López Tello, spokesperson for the organization.

"We demand that a complete reassessment be made of all the trees with a detailed study of the state of each one of them,

She also warns that the municipal regulations on trees require that each of the species that has to be uprooted or felled be replaced by another, an indication that is also included in the Defense project, which contemplates replacing the felled ones with 255 young trees, far from the 389 that are expected to be cut.

"The substitution of a large adult tree like those of Tablada for other younger ones implies the elimination of ecosystem services, such as the reduction of temperature, air pollution, without taking into account the effects on birds," says López.

“The trees planted are cinnamon trees [

], they are the ones that provide us with shade, birds.

That is the grace of the neighborhood, that it seems that we live in the countryside, ”complains González, who emphasizes that all the young inhabitants are in favor of his initiative.

“It is true that the older ones have been waiting for years for improvements to come to their streets and they fear that the allegations will delay the solution”, he comments.

“We hope that sanity will be reached, we have been calling for improvements in the neighborhood for some time, but at no time was it contemplated that they would affect the trees,” Cano abounds.

“Poor state of conservation”

The allegations phase – which not only focuses on the felling of trees, but also on other technical aspects with which the neighbors are not in total agreement – ​​closed on June 29 and now it is the turn of the different municipal entities ―Parks and Gardens, Emasea (the company in charge of managing the water), Traffic and Transport, Public Lighting and the General Directorate of Mobility― write your reports.

In the Sevillian Consistory they are aware of the discomfort of the neighbors before the possible felling of their forest mass.

“This is a complete renovation of the neighborhood that is necessary so that the City Council can assume the maintenance of an area that is in a very poor state of conservation,” municipal sources tell this newspaper, noting that the project should be considered as something more global.

“The municipal reports will determine which ones have to be felled and how it is renewed.

But the City Council does not have a defined position yet”, warn the same sources.

Most of the residents of Tablada, who grew up under the noise of the engines of the Air Force barracks, are military and are used to going into combat.

Now their battlefield is their own neighbourhood, on the one hand they want to finally clean up some streets that have been abandoned for too long and in which the City Council could not intervene because they did not own the land, but not at all costs.

They seek to save the trees that have been rising with the neighborhood, those that have served as a shelter against the heat and that, also in all this time, have been neglected.

They hope to win their first and only battle, that, as Cano says, their claims will be addressed and that much-needed redevelopment will respect their cinnamon trees.

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