On May 23, the publication of the draft of the new Master Plan for the Use and Management of the Teide National Park (PRUG). Since then, they have not missed complaints and claims arising from the document, which has also had support, finding, both in favor and against, political parties, associations of various kinds and public entities.
Overcrowding, climate change and invasive species, the urgent threats to the conservation of the Teide National Park
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In fact, the degree of expectation that the new plan has raised, together with the growing participation of all the entities affected by it, led to the Ecological Transition Minister, José Antonio Valbuena, announcing the extension of the deadline on June 8 to present the pertinent allegations until July 22, a date that has been maintained until today. “The Government is going to guarantee an agreement with all groups because active listening is our premise in everything we do,” he said in an appearance in parliament.
The PRUG document can be viewed in full here.
a good starting point
The new Plan was a project that, a priori, everyone believed was necessary, given the urgency of a National Park increasingly saturated by visits (more than four million in 2018, being the third most visited in the world) and harmed by phenomena such as climate change, forest fires or some introduced herbivores: the mouflon and the wild rabbit, both a serious threat to the conservation of endemic flora.
All these threats could not be faced with the old PRUG, which dated from 2002, making the new proposal technically good, but susceptible to improvements, according to the Park director, Manuel Durbán. A similar position has been adopted by the government party, as well as some of its partners: Sí Podemos Canarias and the Agrupación Socialista Gomera (ASG), both equally with some specific reluctance, but confident in this dialogue process that will add “necessary improvements”.
The new Plan has also received support from more technical sectors. This is the case of Manuel Nogales, delegate of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), who sees the new measures as a good starting point, especially when highlighting certain problems that directly affect the welfare of the park, such as the special incidence of increases in global temperature in higher altitude sites or the exploitation of honey, which displaces the park’s native pollinators. For this reason, for the conservation of space, this “more restrictive” policy is necessary, according to his own words.
Too many prohibitions and few solutions
On the other side we also find deep discontent. Several federations and entities from various fields that carried out traditional activities in the Park have been surprised that they were not counted on to draw up a Plan. For Francisco Beltrán, secretary of the Canarian Mountaineering Federation and member of the Park Board of Trustees, “it is grotesque”, going against the “own values of the Park” by restricting activities that were carried out even before it existed (it was declared as such in 1954).
These types of complaints are what the political parties have received, which have not hesitated to openly question the validity of the plan, asking for its paralysis and even its re-elaboration. This is the case of the mayor of La Orotava, Francisco Linares (Canarian Coalition), who on June 14 publicly promised not to support a Plan “based on prohibition”. “The Teide National Park belongs to Tenerife and not to the politicians of the day or to the technicians,” he stated, along the same lines as other mayors such as that of Los Realejos (PP), and their respective political parties.
However, in addition to this type of protest, branded as “interested” by Valbuena on several occasions, the Government has also received criticism in another tone. Some concern has been expressed from Nueva Canarias about the fact that the new Plan does not have “effective solutions regarding material and human resources”. One of the most noted shortcomings, for example, is in matters of the lack of personnel for the security and conservation of the Park, as pointed out by Jaime Coello, director of the Telesforo Bravo Foundation and Juan Coello.
The issue of mobility, in the spotlight
This ecologist was one of the first to warn about the intention to build new infrastructures in the areas of El Portillo, Chío and Vilaflor, in order to inaugurate three bus shuttles. These, in turn, would include shopping and restaurant areas, in an investment that would cost the regional government some 90 million euros. Faced with this new question, the professor of ecology at the University of La Laguna, José María Fernández-Palacios, is clear: “Teide Park does not lack infrastructure, but, in fact, it has more than enough.
These new buildings do not appear in the draft, but the publication of a future Mobility Plan of the Cabildo de Tenerife, parallel to the approval of the PRUG. If it goes ahead, the use of buses will be implemented together with the prohibition of parking vehicles in the area, except in the parking lots enabled in those same shuttles or inside the park. The Minister of Ecological Transition, for his part, stepped forward to ensure that the draft did not contemplate the creation of “large surface structures”, although it did contemplate “service areas” where they could park and take those shuttle buses, this last in the Mobility Plan of the Cabildo, not in the PRUG.
According to the latest Insular Planning Plan for Tenerife (2021), in 2019 an average of almost 3,000 vehicles entered the Park every day, but the area only has barely 557 authorized parking spaces. The overload, warn the Park technicians, is clear, as can be seen in the numerous retentions that occur. For this reason, the new Mobility Plan will include the prohibition of parking private vehicles, although only in the hours of greatest tourist confluence, both Valbuena and Durban have stressed on different occasions.
An undefined future
For all these reasons, CC-PNC, PP and Sí Podemos Canarias have requested this Thursday an extraordinary plenary session in the Cabildo de Tenerife where a motion will be proposed to suspend the PRUG draft. Motion that, initially, was thought for the ordinary plenary session of June 24, which ended up being extended with the voluntary appearances of the PSOE, according to the nationalists and Sí Podemos, in a “deliberate” way.
It should be remembered that the relevance of the new Plan transcends the National Park itself, as it is a space with numerous recognitions and distinctions: the European diploma of protected areas from the Council of Europe in 1989 and its World Heritage status since 2007 are a good example of it. For this reason, it is not only a space with clear singularities that makes it a treasure of nature, but also a point of reference for other parks on the islands and throughout the national territory.
