The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, sent a letter this Tuesday to the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, urging them to stop the felling of trees due to the expansion of metro line 11 in the area around Atocha station. The area affected by the works, where 70 trees will fall, is part of the Landscape of Light, a protected area that will be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.
The Ministry of Culture is one of those in charge of defending the operational guidelines of the UNESCO World Heritage convention in Spain. In the letter, Urtasun explains that according to UNESCO regulations, the Community of Madrid and the Madrid City Council should have given notice, through the Ministry of Culture, of any work that is produced within the space declared World Heritage. According to this letter, the directives also require a heritage impact report to be carried out prior to the project, which has not been done. This report allows the World Heritage Committee to propose alternatives and measures to mitigate the damage, in this case, to the trees.
According to a spokesperson for the ministry, they have tried to request information about the work from the Madrid City Council and the Community of Madrid on three occasions, once in October, another in December and another last Monday, when they learned that logging in this area was scheduled for this Tuesday and until Friday by the media. The City Council responded to the October request, “but it did not clarify anything for us,” commented the spokesperson. They have not received any response from the Community of Madrid.
Urtasun has urged Ayuso and Almeida to meet to address this issue “as soon as possible” and to stop logging until that meeting takes place. Although logging has already been done in the area of Comillas, Madrid Río, Palos de la Frontera and Conde de Casal, the logging scheduled for this Tuesday has not yet begun. The workers in the area have limited themselves to fencing the gardens of Jimena Quirós, where cedar trees up to 30 meters high are going to fall and where several homeless people sleep who, on Tuesday morning, had not yet been evicted from the area. . In front of the fences, about twenty neighbors were cold, but they held the No to logging banner. “Before we fought for the hope we had that they would not cut down trees, now we protest so that they know what they have done,” commented a neighbor.
Almeida criticizes Minister Urtasun
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The mayor of Madrid, during an event in Retiro Park, criticized that the Ministry of Culture “acts surprised.” According to Almeida, this matter has had “sufficient public impact” and he has considered the minister's decision as “a particular and partisan interest.” “I would like,” Almeida said, “for the Ministry of Culture to tell me how many places that are World Heritage Sites in which damage to the trees has occurred has been interested, or if it is only interested in the city of Madrid. ”.
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