Gardens and public green areas are usually conceived as spaces with an aesthetic and ecological utility, which contribute to improving the quality of life of residents and transform municipalities into more pleasant places to walk, rest or simply look. The City Council of Tacoronte has gone a step further by planting a garden that will also bear fruit. An arboretum or arboretum of about 3,000 square meters made up of 72 fruit trees of 60 traditional varieties of this town in the north of Tenerife that will also serve as a seed bank and as a space for knowledge and training.
This collection of fruit trees is located on a plot of land in the La Atalaya urbanization, in the Tacorontero neighborhood of La Caridad, near the plots of the Huerto Urbano and the vercompostera, a community composting project with the help of red worms, whose objective is promote the reuse of organic waste from households.
La Atalaya is a population center that mixes the urban and the rural in an area closely linked to agricultural and livestock work. With this collection of fruit trees, a further step is taken. In a few years it will allow to have a small edible forest that will be a redoubt for the conservation of fruit trees in the area that, in some cases, have a dwindling population.
Training and conservation
The Councilor for the Environment of the Tacoronte City Council, Carmela Díaz Vilela (Si se puede), explained that this fruit arboretum will have a long way to go in the future. After the execution of the tasks of preparing the land and planting the trees, tasks that began last March, «The intention of the Consistory and of the promoters of this idea is that it becomes a living space dedicated to training, with workshops and activities in which it is possible to learn everything related to this type of variety». In addition, it will serve as a seed bank to be able to plant some of these local species in other places.
Díaz Vilela explained that “it will form a park with more rural characteristics, equipped with paths to walk it and with all the associated ecosystem benefits. An ecosystem of the municipality is not reproduced, but it does contain other native species that will accompany these trees, also favoring the presence of other varieties of fauna such as insects and pollinators.
The Tacorontero City Council has made a modest investment in this initiative: just 7,475 euros, of which 2,520 euros have been used to pay for work with machinery, 1,120 euros to pay for labor, 1,080 euros for the purchase of the 72 trees fruit trees and 1,000 euros for the installation of an irrigation network.
The intention of those responsible for this project is to carry out the necessary grafts on the different fruit trees next winter, when the trees are expected to be well rooted in their new home and better developed. Over the years, and the growth of the planted specimens, this previously vacant space in the La Atalaya urbanization could become a real forest of fruit trees that would serve as an open classroom to learn about, and at certain times taste, part of the agricultural legacy of the municipality of Tacoronte.
