It was the year 1881 when the Tenerife Newspaper awoke with an article by its founder, Patricio Estévanez, proposing the construction of a large urban park in the capital of Santa Cruz, an initiative supported by the municipal architect, Manuel de Cámara y Cruz, and the no less important endorsement of Dr. Diego Guigou y Costa, author of the study Climatology of Tenerife and its physiopathological influence, signed in 1932, and who showed support for the future oasis so that “children could play while breathing pure air“.
Through the new Pro-Park Commission, residents and the administration work hand in hand, and with the organization of festivals, stalls, and tombolas, they raise the 300,000 pesetas with which they acquire a 67,000 square meter estate. That enclosure, an early model of urban environmental management and an example of early citizen participation, is the García Sanabria Park, which now boasts a ceiba tree, a coconut tree, a century-old tamarind, and a spectacular catalogue of tropical flora including bougainvilleas, Indian laurels, flamboyant trees, ficus, and frangipani trees, among many others, all of them filters and emitters of the pure air that Guigou y Costa spoke of.
During that same period, trees were also sprouting in the city of Gran Canaria. This is the case of Doramas Park, designed by the English colony at the end of the 19th century in the style of the time, with equally subtropical and tropical species adorned with statues and refreshing ponds and fountains.
It was a transitional period between centuries in which trees provided shade, oxygen, and also science and prestige. Exemplified by marvels such as the century-old Tropical Garden of the Hesperides of the Marquisate of Arucas, of romantic inspiration and home to more than 2,500 species, some of them endangered. Or those created with strictly scientific intent, as is the case with the Acclimation Garden of La Orotava, in Puerto de la Cruz, the oldest in the Canary Islands, founded by order of King Carlos III in 1788 to preserve species from the tropics in a part of the national territory, and which would later have its mirror image in the Viera y Clavijo Botanical Garden in Gran Canaria, opened in 1952 by the Swedish botanist Eric Ragnor Sventenius, previously a researcher of the endemic flora of the Canary Islands in the garden of La Orotava, and which sought a new place of study on the round island where “the plants felt almost as comfortable as in their places of origin”.
While this was happening at sea level, in the hills and mountains, the atmosphere was more sinister and gloomy under the sound of the axe and the saw, in a dizzying deforestation that continued from the Conquest -especially on the island of Gran Canaria- until the Franco regime ordered a reversal with large reforestations of Canary Island pine in its peaks in the middle of the 20th century.
With export agriculture, that of tomatoes and bananas, but above all with the tourist boom, the inland population moved to the coast with two losses: the loss of cultural uses and their intimate knowledge of the natural environment; and the loss of soil in the main urban nuclei of the coast that ended up devoured by the need to cover the increasingly growing demand for housing.
Thousands of Canarians who could distinguish between a mocán and an acebuche, a tajinaste and a bicácaro, now are born, live, and die in an asphalted and tiled environment. Those who resist this loss of the inland island try to cushion the sorrow and the need with some goats or hens on the roof, as chronicled in those transitional times.
But in a world that is beginning to get used to bikinis, Swedish tourism, English on beaches and terraces, and Japanese electronics at duty-free prices, the original countryside is now considered the domain of the backwards, with fluorescent commercials, parking lots for the increasingly bulky automobile park, and large asphalted avenues on the original gravel or the old cobblestone pavements – mentioned by Oliver Stone in his work Tenerife and its six satellites published in London in 1887 – are seen as the height of sophistication and economic success.
This is how increasingly harsh capitals are created and erected, much more in Gran Canaria than in Tenerife, which somewhat benefits from the contagious effect of the pioneering García Sanabria, spreading greenery through its avenues. However, in those years of demographic explosion and four-stroke explosion of the primitive engines, they stain the façades of the main capital arteries black, only relieved by the persistent trade wind that hides the pollution fungus.
Now the trees that appear in the urban fabric are actually pure survivors, perhaps dying fossils that are slowly charring and are there as relics of the past in spaces that in their rich previous life functioned as farms and old orchards, accompanied, both in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, by those planted in the same era.
Starting in the second half of the 19th century, as detailed by History Doctor Mari Carmen Naranjo Santana in her work Urban Trees, Hygienism, and Knowledge Networks in the Canary Islands, they were incorporated into urban spaces “as a decorous and moral element, but also for their hygienic-sanitary characteristics.”
Those survivors from the mid-20th century, who now look strange among the 15-story blocks and asbestos rooftops, become iconic specimens that escaped being cut down due to the love of an owner or the significance given by the nearest neighborhood, but they won’t last long either.
They have only managed to delay the agony, mostly due to a combination of extreme pruning, lack of maintenance, and new construction, resulting from neglect.
With the expansion of the inner roads, a similar situation occurs. A work signed by Javier Estéves and the municipal archivist of Guía, Sergio Aguiar, accompanied by revealing photographs of the time, portrays the evolution of the decline in the accesses of the Lomo Guillén neighborhood. This serves as a guideline for what has happened in much of the geography of the Autonomous Community: “Since 1885, its landscape is a repeated history of plantations and neglect that leads to a continuous succession of scenarios where numerous plant species parade,” Estévez and Aguiar recount. “One follows the other. All with the same beginning and all with the same end: planting and chopping down due to abandonment,” so the cypresses planted in the 40s had already started to be lost irreversibly by the year 1965 without much prospect of improvement from the responsible authorities.
The balance of these policies is uneven in an archipelago that offers dozens of microclimates, where the conditions of the north compared to those of the south are diametrically opposed – from laurisilva to cardonal – and with reliefs that rise from the sea surface to thousands of meters high on impossible slopes that condition its fauna and vegetation. But in all its cities, to a greater or lesser extent, they increasingly display endless clearings that, with the urgency of climate change, are emerging as potential deserts difficult to live in, and which, for now, are facing the challenge of the new provisions being prepared by the Government of the Canary Islands to ratify a Climate Change Law that envisages one tree for every three inhabitants.
Rules that embrace the recommendations of the World Health Organization, which establishes a minimum of between ten and fifteen square meters of green space per citizen and that these should be accessible within a maximum of 15 minutes from each residence, representing a huge challenge for their municipalities.
Not only because they have to increase, as in the case of the capital of Gran Canaria, their number of specimens by no less than 112 percent, and 15 percent in the case of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, but also because everything done up to now has been wrong due to a fundamental premise: the consideration of a living being, the tree, reduced to the category of mere urban furniture.
Asphalt, the perfect heater of urban areas
Jaime Coello Bravo holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Management and is a spokesperson for the Telesforo Bravo Foundation. Like all those consulted for the elaboration of this report, Coello Bravo points out the need to “reverse the concept and advance in the awareness that a tree is life.”
Coello Bravo asserts that in any conflict situation, nature is always the loser. “We have seen in the García Sanabria park how, after a red eucalyptus branch falls, they cut down the entire specimen. I do not doubt that there may be weighty reasons related to safety, but unfortunately, that is always the case.”
This loss in the game occurs for the most varied reasons. “There are emblematic cases such as what happened in San Sebastián de La Gomera, where the city council has taken on the flame trees arguing that they are not endemic, without foreseeing a replacement and ending their protective effects, shade, and temperature decrease.” The same happens with neighbours “who complain that they’re losing their view, and once the dog dies, the rabies is gone,” under the perception that trees do not vote.
The clearings due to neglect or omission in the case of Santa Cruz de Tenerife create “tremendous spaces, such as the cruise terminal towards the auditorium,” which he describes as an urban desert and “where you could fry an egg on days of extreme radiation,” and he speaks out against urban projects that advocate for open spaces as seen with the former plaza of Cristo de La Laguna, “which had trees,” or the walkway of Lago Martiánez in Puerto de la Cruz.
The same happens in places like the huge coastal promenade of the seafront avenue of the capital of Gran Canaria, where, in addition to the debatable construction that began to be developed from 1965 of a gigantic asphalt artery bordering the sea after reclaiming land, the mistake of not having a single specimen along its over eight kilometres of pedestrian route between Las Alcaravaneras and the San Cristóbal neighbourhood is added. Furthermore, in its median lane separation for traffic, they opted to line it with an endless chain of purely ornamental Washington palm trees.Industries are often chosen, as stated by Coello, for being “not generating any shadow”. These large strips of sun-heated asphalt not only significantly increase the city’s temperature as they “function as a perfect heater” for the air coming from the sea to the land. According to a study published in the magazine Science Advances, at high temperatures, they release harmful secondary organic aerosols into the atmosphere from the asphalt itself.
When the ambient temperature rises above 30 degrees Celsius, the pavement, depending on its composition, can ‘boil’ up to 70 degrees Celsius, along with the cement reaching up to 60 degrees under those conditions, which, together, act as precursors to the so-called ‘heat islands’.
Landscape architect Flora Pescador, a professor of Urban Planning and Land Management, asserts that it is imperative to eliminate these heat islands because in the main cities of the Canary Islands, people “live with their backs to nature” with completely impermeable urban fabrics where the temperature artificially rises.
Contrary to the success stories proclaimed by the city councils, labeling their tree masses as ‘urban forests’ to advertise their plantations and forest park, Pescador highlights a disaffection for trees in the islands. This disaffection is a cultural trait that refers to times when there was a lack of water, but now cities could be much greener since they are ‘pioneers in desalination and water purification’.
An example of this citizen indifference is the lack of protests or the minimal demonstrations when large trees, 20-30 years old, are excessively pruned. No outcry arises, as seen with the impressive laurels of the Alameda de Colón in the capital of Gran Canaria, which are in a serious state of disrepair, or with the transplanted or felled specimens found or located along the route of the future Metroguagua.
It is also admitted that the limited territory, with a high population density, leaves little soil liable to accommodate more trees. However, a greater green dimension could be given to the ‘Whale Ravine’, as in the Juan Pablo II Park, which is a pleasure to behold, or in perimeter areas like ‘San José del Álamo’. Undoubtedly, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria lacks a large park on a much grander scale, yet the Canarian cities are not ready for such proportions.
This lack of preparation is not only due to limited territory but also due to the development trajectory. Since the tourism boom in the 1960s, cities have grown in population numbers, but not in the same proportion as their green spaces. Despite mandatory land contributions for construction, a significant strategic reserve was never created, except in suburban areas, which Pescador hopes will one day become those great parks.
In this regard, it is suggested that “climate shelters” could be implemented to cover the vegetation deficit, as it is essential to find a formula to introduce more greenery. While it was more challenging in the past, there are now maintenance methods that offer ‘coexistence with nature’: we are part of this world, and that is how we should understand it.
It is in this incomprehension, in the entrenched concept of a tree as a mere ‘disposable decorative item’, where Domingo Afonso, an agronomist and spokesperson for the initiative promoting an ‘Urban Tree Law’, points out the problem. This law was unanimously passed by the Parliament of the Canary Islands in 2022, urging to protect all urban trees in the archipelago, conduct an inventory, ban uprooting, severe pruning, and develop a tree plan in municipalities – plans which none of the 88 localities in the Canary Islands has, as Afonso claims.
Afonso, in line with Pescador’s sentiments, states that trees in the Canary Islands are reduced to the status of ‘furniture’. This implies widespread devastation. “In Las Palmas, hundreds of trees have been affected along the Metroguagua route; in Santa Cruz, the same, most of them diseased due to poor care, and in La Laguna, centenary specimens were cut down to enlarge the sidewalk on Camino Largo.”
The engineer adds to this scenario “aggressive pruning, where one cannot cut more than a third of a tree branch, as published in the BOC”, all within an Autonomous Community “where no municipal ordinance regulates them”.
If such an ordinance exists, according to a forestry engineer, it should align with the same practices used in the forested areas of the archipelago. “The arboriculture used in parks and gardens,” he explains, “is a heritage of hortofruticulture, which prunes an apple tree or pear tree for fruit picking, opens the canopy for more flowers and increased production. Those techniques cannot be applied to the laurel trees in any square that we see shaven, in a confined space where they could not develop their full potential, and where.
Improving Urban Green Areas for Better Environment Quality
He’s “mutilated”, greatly widespread. In Moya, the trees in front of the cultural centre have just undergone severe pruning, but this is by no means an isolated case. It happens in all municipalities, and that’s why we need to introduce forestry to towns and cities because it focuses on coverage, the percentage of shaded areas, rather than the number of trees, which is irrelevant when you plant a row of sticks compared to a large specimen with a broad canopy.
The list of mistakes includes tree pits that are “ridiculously small compared to the future size of the specimen”, the lack of a suitable substrate to support, feed and oxygenate, and planting on cement bases with little to no coverage of fertile soil.
It also affects “neglect in watering, fertilising, pest and disease control, or in sewerage or wiring works, where a few workers can destroy entire rows with spills or cement washes.”
This is why it is urgently necessary to have a manual of good practices for the different regions of the Canary Islands, because planting in Vilaflor, Telde, or Puerto del Rosario is not the same: “everything has been invented in arboriculture, but we have not managed to get the authorities to apply it.” With exceptions, but far from here.
Borja Rodríguez is the councillor for Urban Development, Urban Planning, and Environment of the European Green Capital 2012, and Global Green City in 2019: Vitoria-Gasteiz, with over 26 square meters of park per inhabitant. Its tree population makes it the provincial capital with the highest green area per inhabitant in Spain, surpassing the World Health Organization’s recommendations with over 112,000 trees of 150 different species for a population of 259,000 people.
Rodríguez states that, having achieved this arboreal treasure, since 2021 they have implemented new measures aimed at taking it to the next level, seeking the opinions of top experts.
“We believe,” he explains, “that we shouldn’t focus so much on the number of trees we plant or replace, but on their quality. We want Vitoria-Gasteiz to have large trees that can thrive, providing environmental benefits and shade, promoting biodiversity, being more resistant to pests, and adapting to the conditions we must anticipate due to climate change.”
“Ultimately, a proposal that seeks excellence, with remarkable tree-lined avenues where the benefits are tangible and effective. This is why it is essential to prepare the ground well, plant species more suitable for the environment in which they will be planted, and take care of maintenance,” because, as he specifies, “trees reduce street temperatures, enrich biodiversity in urban areas, enhance their areas to make them more welcoming, and promote people’s health.” In fact, Vitoria-Gasteiz ranks in the top 10 cities with the highest life expectancy in the country.
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