Pulling the Wool BCN's Green Lungs Have Emphysema by Anna Gurney

“Nosotros somos líderes en la protección de Collserola”, announced Mayor Jordi Hereu, months before they chopped down a hundred year old forest to build a new rollercoaster on Tibidabo in April this year. The protesters weren’t just crazy hippies chaining themselves to trees (although they did do that); they consisted of 30 different organisations including famous Catalan actors and Jane Goodall. Xavier Trias, leader of Convergència i Unió, said that it was an error to continue with the project, which had a political majority against it. “Undemocratic” and “aggressive” are also words that have been used to describe this tactic of whipping out the chainsaws and doing irreversible damage before the chance for appeal. Hereu holds his head high over the montaña rusa plan because he has numbers: 50 trees felled versus 190 planted. However, it seems a bit strange that someone so shortsighted thinks that replacing something in a hundred years time is a solution.

The Collserola Parque Natural sits within hiking distance of 50% of Catalonia’s population, and developers have long been trying to get at it. It needs protecting. The Deputy Mayor and Head of Environmental Services, Imma Mayol I Beltrán, said that the plan is to “bring the hills down to the city, not the other way round”. On the plus side, they have found 50 hectares more parkland (partly by bulldozing illegal homes near the cemetery). On the down side, this is much less than they promised to conserve and they have been particularly sticky about agreeing to limits of the park. Both the ecologists and city hall wanted buffer zones between town and countryside, but it was Barcelona City Hall that declared some of them “outside the park” and started building. Then they began inventing new acronyms (Espais Periurbans de Regulació Especial - EPRE) to classify spaces inside the park where they can put sports halls and miradores.

Next time you look up at the red and white tower (the one that wasn’t designed by Lord Norman Foster), follow the hill down to the left, and imagine what it will look like when Sacresa Group has finished building two skyscrapers, 600 luxury homes and a shopping centre. As we plunge into a recession, it will probably be completed just in time to be sold off as public housing. Maybe they can relocate the displaced: “Es qué... I used to have a garden, a view of the cemetery and a dirt road. Now I have a power shower and a car park”.

Well, at least they’ll protect the heart of the park, right? Depends what you mean by heart. The infrastructure plan, from 2006 to 2026, includes a tunnel from Horta- Cerdanyà and a road from Molins del Rei-Sant Cugat. Both will cross the sierra. The Plataforma per a la Defensa de Collserola already have more than 3,000 signatures on a manifesto against the fragmentation of the park. If they continue slicing it up, putting viewpoints here and fountains there, the city’s “green lung” will just become part of the city. It needs real conservation, not just marketing. It is blindingly obvious that given another ten years of our carbon spewing, construction frenzied society, where selling lots of cars is a good thing, the most valuable asset possible for a city will be green space.

More info at collserola.org and parccollserola.net.