Some years ago, it was decided to ‘bury’ the M30 Madrid motorway-ringroad. The stretch just south of Puerta de Toledo coincides with the River Manzanares, and the works involved bull-dozing huge stretches of urban park and felling hundreds of trees. An awful lot of rubble was just dumped into the already sluggish river.
Nature seems determined to fight back, though. I’m sure there never used to be a meadow like the one in the photo, which now has to be one of the lushest green spaces in the dry summer city.
It’s inaccessible to pedestrians so surely could be, at least temporarily, a really useful wildlife habitat. Well, that was what I had hoped, anyway. But, as the picture shows, the ayuntamiento have sent a troop of men in wellies and armed with petrol-powered strimmers to ‘deal with it’.
There is, theoretically, a ‘proyecto de embellecimiento‘ in progress – a beautification project – for the river bank. But presumably the beauty must be controlled and approved by the authorities before it will be tolerated.
don't confuse the narrator 