Author: Ben

Mayor Gallardon has promised to plant 254,000 new trees in Madrid before the end of 2007. The plan is to cover the mess left by work on the M-30 ring road with urban forest parks, that will cover twelve times the area currently occupied by Madrid’s one and only real expanse of green, the city centre’s giant Retiro park.

Sounds great, until you listen to what the opposition has to say. Pedro Santí­n, the PSOE Environmental Director for Madrid points out that a new tree requires at least 50 square meters to survive, whereas Gallardons plans leave just 13 square meters per tree. “This means that in the space provided, the council can only plant 67,000 new trees with guarantees of survival”, said Santí­n, “if they plant 254,000 in two years, 95 percent will die due to lack of space”.

So will common sense win the day? A quarter of a million trees is such a succulent number, so appealing to the public imagination in a city with so few trees, that no doubt they will be planted anyway, water shortages will continue to prevail, and indeed many of the trees will die.

This is certainly the opinion of Rosa Villalba, a Retiro tree surgeon interviewed this week in 20 Minutos, who is fed up with seeing 40 year old trees ripped up and replaced by a dozen doomed saplings. “In 50 years we won’t see a single tree when we look upwards. We’ll just see empty sky,” she predicts, “the future is anything but green. In Madrid, at the rate were going, they’ll have to give us a bottle of oxygen to be able to survive. We’ll have to pay to breathe.” Now there’s optimism for you…

Princess Leonor is born to Prince Felipe and his once newsreading wife Letizia, posing an interesting question for the Spanish constitution… Looks like a promised change will now be rushed through allowing Leonor to rule as Queen one day – another victory for the women of Spain!

After Mayor Gallardon’s sterling efforts this summer to dig up every other street in the capital in time for the autumn return to work, a new plan is born to bring further agonies to the city streets in the New Year. This time, ironically, it’s more public transport that’s going to cause all the problems. The Metro will not be opening throughout the night on Fridays and Saturdays as had originally been hoped. A fleet of 109 buses will be following the exact route of the Metro lines and stops instead.

That should be interesting in the case of Line 3, whose stops pop up in some of the tightest streets of the old quarter. Driving a car past Lavapies Metro is hard enough, let alone a bus. And anyone who has sat in atraffic jam in a taxi on the Paseo de la Castellana at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning will quickly spot the futility of this plan. The traffic in the early hours of a Saturday is as bad as it is at 9 a.m. on Mondays. Adding 109 more heavy diesel vehicles into the mix is not going to help, especially as the Madrileños are far too addicted to their cars to see this as an interesting alternative, whether they have been drinking or not.

The real question must be, however, what is wrong with the Metro? Why clog up the city streets by following these perfectly good underground routes, routes that would ease the overground chaos instead of exacerbating it? Perhaps it’s part of Mayor Gallardon’s secret plan to drive us all to hate our cars with such a passion that we eventually sell them all in exchange for bicycles. Yes! The suicidal pursuit of cycling in Madrid! Don’t get me started on that…

Now this is a sensible move. While the UK falls into another collective psychosis over the next epidemic that is(n’t) going to wipe out tens of thoudands, millions even, the Spanish government puts up a simple informative website, http://www.gripeaviar.es/, helping everyone over here to calm down. Good common sense.

‘With a birth rate estimated at 1.28 per woman – far below the replacement rate of 2.1 and one of the lowest in Europe – Spain’s population will fall (and age) dramatically over the coming years. According to Expatica: “By 2050, Spain will have only 30 million people – three quarters of its current population – as well as one of the oldest population profiles in the world”.

No matter how the current crisis around Ceuta and Melilla turns out, a people like the Spaniards, with so little commitment to their own future, will never have the strength to resist being overwhelmed by the burgeoning and desperate masses of the third world at their doorstep.’

An extract from FaceRight.com

Interesting facts in the first paragraph, but is this really about Spaniards having no commitment to their own future? I would say that it has more to do with new professional opportunities for women that disappear as soon as they try to integrate a large family into their working lives, and the fact that rising prices and mortgages make it very difficult to be able to afford to have more than one child these days. I’ll have to find out what the Spanish think about this…