Thousands of empty tree pits that for years have dotted the streets of Zaragoza already have a date to be filled with life again, and the city is facing the definitive phase of recovery of its urban trees after four years of transformation of the management and planning model. The 2026-2027 planting campaign will incorporate 3,370 new trees and will cover practically all of the 2,557 plantable spaces that were still without a specimen in June, putting an end to a deficit of trees accumulated for more than a decade.
The evolution recorded in recent years reflects a change in trend in the municipal management of tree heritage. Since 2021, for the first time in the recent history of the city, the number of trees planted has steadily exceeded the number of specimens removed. The maximum was reached in 2023, with 5,608 new plantations, the best balance in the last decade.
For the Minister of the Environment, Tatiana Gaudes, «Zaragoza works, and a lot, to protect and improve its urban trees». After decades of «neglect» in which the city «has been losing trees», the councillor considered that the data indicate that «we have managed to reverse the trend, winning the pulse against the loss of trees».
MUNICIPAL INVENTORY OF TREES
At the same time, the Green Infrastructure Service has developed an extensive process of reviewing, updating and characterising the municipal inventory of trees. As a result, Zaragoza currently has a register of 171,138 municipally-owned wooded positions, of which 77,645 correspond to individual tree pits on roads and green areas with individualized monitoring, while another 93,493 belong to trees located in parks and green spaces without individual tree pits.
This technical work has made it possible to know precisely the real state of the tree heritage and to distinguish between living trees, dead specimens pending removal, stumps, empty tree pits and other situations that until now made it difficult to rigorously plan the actions.
One of the most relevant advances has been the individualised classification of each empty tree pit. Of the 3,339 positions managed directly by the Green Infrastructure Service that have the absence of a live tree, 2,544 have been identified as susceptible to replacement through different planting modalities, while another 750 will have to be closed for technical, urban planning or safety reasons. Only 50 positions remain pending completion of their proposal for action.
THE CAMPAIGN WILL START IN SEPTEMBER
The 2026-2027 planting campaign will take place between September 2026 and March 2027 and will combine actions financed through the new conservation contract, extensions of the canon, minor contracts and compensation plantations derived from felling authorisations. The objective is to eliminate the historical pocket of empty tree pits and place Zaragoza in a scenario of ordinary maintenance, in which the new plantations respond only to the casualties that may occur each year.
The increase recorded in the number of fellings during 2023, 2024 and part of 2025 is not due to a deterioration of the plant heritage, but to the removal of dead or dangerous trees accumulated over the years. The classification implemented since the end of 2024 allows us to know for the first time the specific reason for each felling, noting that in 2025 the main cause was precisely the removal of already dead trees.
ARBOMAP
Along with the improvement of management on the ground, the City Council has promoted a profound modernization of the information and monitoring tools through the evolution of the Arbomap system. The incorporation of the «Inspection proposal» field makes it possible to define for each empty tree pit whether it should be subject to a new planting or closure, while the future implementation of Arbomap 3.0 will preserve the complete history of each wooded position and will facilitate much more precise planning of future actions.
Once the 2026-2027 campaign is over, the Green Infrastructure Service plans to direct the replacement effort towards green areas, relying on the historical information incorporated into the inventory to schedule new plantations and stump removal actions. With this, Zaragoza will move from a model focused on recovering a historical deficit to another based on the continuous and planned maintenance of its green infrastructure, supported by updated technical information and individualized management of the tree heritage.
