With the announcement of the 2022 Christmas lighting, the Madrid City Council announced that the 6,700 chains, the 115 cherry trees and the 13 large luminous fir trees that will be distributed throughout the capital would be joined by some novelty, of which no details had been revealed until now. And a week before the lights are switched on -on November 24 at 7 p.m.-, it is already known that one of them is the installation in Puerta del Sol of a giant luminous fir tree 35 meters high crowned by a star.
The tree, which has a structure divided into 14 floors and 14 meters in diameter at its base, is designed to simulate the appearance of a large natural fir tree. To achieve this, on the metal structure “will be placed branch-like elements covered with green tinsel,” explains the Madrid City Council.
The decoration will consist of a luminous cord of warm white color with micro LED lamps with 100 points of light per meter and a luminous thread of the same tone to give light to the star. In total, the tree will have 240,000 LED light points.
The installation of this luminous tree began on Tuesday, November 15, and its assembly requires a special team of seven installers and a 40-ton crane. Meanwhile, the remodeling works of the Puerta del Sol continue around it, leaving images like these.
On the other hand, the tree that has so far decorated this point of the capital leaves its traditional location in 2022 to debut a new location in Madrid Rio, where it began to be installed a few weeks ago.
In Plaza de España, the place where the Christmas lights will be turned on, a new 19-meter natural fir tree is already in place. It is not the one from last year: as it had no root ball, it could not be replanted and was transferred to a composting plant to turn it into substrate.
Christmas 2022 at Puerta del Sol
The fact that the remodeling works of the Puerta del Sol are still underway has not prevented the installation of this fir tree and will not prevent the square from hosting the New Year’s Eve chimes again this year.
This was confirmed by the Department of Works and Equipment of the Madrid City Council a few days ago to this media: “The grapes can be celebrated in Sol. In the absence of executing the new dome of Cercanías and some other finishing touches, the square will be clear for that date. The totality of the remodeling works of Puerta del Sol and its surroundings will be finished next spring, focusing in the last months on the streets adjacent to the square”.
Christmas lighting in the context of the energy crisis
At the end of September the Madrid City Council announced that Madrid would again be illuminated for Christmas and that, as last year, the lighting would reach 230 points spread over the 21 districts of the capital with an investment of nearly 4 million euros. He thus resolved the uncertainty about what would happen this year with the Christmas lights, a question that was floating in the air due to the context of energy crisis and inflation currently being experienced in Europe.
It is this context that led to postpone the celebration of the LuzMadrid festival and which has led some cities like Barcelona to reduce the time when the Christmas lights will be on or the number of days of lighting, as is the case of Seville.
The capital does not plan to implement measures in that direction: “The City Council is aware of the energy situation in which we live and precisely for years installs a Christmas lighting that is 100% LED. In addition, he argues that “the consumption cost of one hour of Christmas lighting is about 180 euros, which is less than 1 euro per day per illuminated location”.
The Christmas lights in Madrid, as we said, will be switched on on November 24 at 19h in Plaza de España and will shine until January 6. After contacting the sectors involved in the Christmas campaign (traders, hoteliers, restaurateurs…), the City Council has decided to keep the same schedule as last year:
- Sunday to Thursday: from 18h to 00h.
- Fridays and Saturdays: from 6pm to 1am
- December 24th and January 5th: from 6pm to 3am
- December 31: 6 pm to 6 am
On the other hand, the traditional figurative nativity scenes, the big ball at the confluence of Alcalá and Gran Vía streets or the big luminous menina, “elements to which some novelty will be added” will be maintained.