Agustina Beltrán walked the path with more energy than anyone else. Pushing with enthusiasm. She was worried, above all, about the arrival of the hot hours. “Won’t you have a glass of water?” The mayor of Vilaflor de Chasna yesterday thoroughly showed the first results of the “edible forest” of the Huerta Grande project. Along with her, the United Nations specialist in “productive forests”, Juan Antonio Hernández, and Julio Bernardos, an agricultural engineer.
The so-called Huerta Grande is an abandoned agricultural property, located at the back of the Casa de los Soler, a 17th century ancestral property. A vacant lot that stopped working in 2017 and has an area of 23,500 square meters. Until the Chasnera corporation took over the property thanks to a subsidy of half a million euros from the Cabildo of Tenerife.
The objective is to configure a local development project consisting of a forest that produces food, which allows training unemployed people, turning them into “replicators” of this model, complementing the Casa de los Soler when its restoration is undertaken and betting on sovereignty food, generating “a garden in the middle of the desert. The important thing is that tomorrow we have food and water,” warned Hernández, who stressed that “it is not an experiment because the experiment began seven years ago.”
25 tons of food
At that time, the first of these forests was created in Tenerife, the most notable example of which, as he explained, is that of Adeje, which has generated 25 tons of food for families in vulnerable situations, thanks to the 400 species planted there. From the last “experiment”, created in Gran Canaria, “we will be collecting millet in a few months to make ribs with pineapples,” he promised.
“We have to green the Islands and, if we do not plant forests, we have an uncertain future,” said this United Nations specialist in the middle of a heat wave in the month of October and after a harrowing summer of forest fires.
Julio Bernardos, however, made it clear that the climate emergency that the planet is experiencing is fighting a tough battle against the Spanish bureaucracy.
“It took us a year to close the project,” he complained, emphasizing that the formal start of work was just over two years ago. Some legal difficulties to which must be added the merely technical ones to dispose of the species and components in the chronologically stipulated time, something complicated.
The project, which is a paradigm shift, has had sufficient public support. To the half a million euros for the purchase of the property, we must add more than 659,000 euros for the execution of the project, as well as 211,000 euros for the training of thirteen people in charge of a subsidy, also from the island corporation.
The idea, furthermore, is that if the Casa de los Soler is going to house an ethnographic center related to Brother Pedro, according to Agustina Beltrán, the Huerta Grande remembers this religious man born in the municipality. In fact, among the roads of the farm there are the so-called “Brother Pedro’s orchards”, where they intend to plant medicinal species.
Phytopurifier and greenhouse
Of the total square meters of the land, around one hectare has been dedicated to cultivation, while the rest is occupied, or will be occupied, by gardens, paths, the plant treatment plant and the greenhouse, which is underground and takes advantage of the thermal insulation provided by the plant itself. place, formed by terraces and walls.
With what the garden produces, the aim is to generate employment and food for restaurants and spaces such as the educational centers of Vilaflor, in addition to generating income through the more than two million people who, every year, pass through the municipality.
The phytopurifier will allow the “gray” and “black” waters to go through a cleaning process and infiltrate the soil, generating microbial life.
Phytopurification is a set of biological systems that take advantage of the capacity of plants, both to purify water and to transfer oxygen to it. All in support of the, at the moment, twelve species grown on that hectare.
As the heat sets in, the mayor strives to avoid suffering from high temperatures.
The farm workers carry out their work and take care of Brother Pedro’s plants, walls and orchards, making possible the transformation of the desert into an oasis.
