Neither a new park nor substantial improvements. This is the perception that the residents of Ciudad Lineal and Salamanca have about the Madrid City Council’s Parque de Ventas project, which will transform both districts by 2027. The discontent crystallized in January 2025 in the creation of a meeting space, the Plataforma de Afectados M-30, which tries to get the City Council to address the real interests of the affected neighborhoods.
The platform is made up of social and neighborhood organizations from both sides of the M-30 together with Ecologists in Action and the Platform for the Right to the City. For months they have been expressing their opposition to the project to cover the M-30 at the height of the Ventas bridge, which they have dubbed “the slab of Ventas”.
Now they have called a march in protest against a project that, they point out, promotes “the appeal, the impulse to gentrification and the tourist use of apartments that the municipal operation will entail”, according to statements published in the Gacetín de Madrid.
What do the affected neighbors denounce?
Among the damages and impacts that the platform denounces about the proposal of the Madrid City Council are the following:
- Exorbitant cost of the project: it exceeds by 20% the price per square meter of newly built housing in the city of Madrid.
- Up to 54 trees will be cut down on both sides of the M-30, many of them large.
- The installation of an open-air auditorium with 300 m² bleachers and kiosks, they point out, makes clear the real intention of turning it into another tourist attraction.
- Covering these scarce 190 meters of the entire M-30 does not solve or mitigate the impact of pollution and noise.
- The plan is to plant 200 trees in an average soil thickness of 1.25m, which is insufficient for any tree of a certain size to take root.
- As it does not reach the Ventas bridge, it does not represent any substantial improvement in connectivity.
- What is invested in the covering is not invested in other real needs of the neighborhoods.
- For two years we will add to the current deficient situation the acoustic, visual and pollution impact caused by the transport, assembly and handling of the work.
In the video that illustrates this section, which includes an explanatory talk about the Parque de Ventas, those affected summarize in one sentence the only good thing that, in their opinion, this project has for the neighborhood: “It has brought together people from La Elipa, people from Salamanca and people from our neighborhood”.
For the City Council it is a “naturalization project”.
The City Council’s position is that it is a naturalization project that will connect Madrid’s districts “pedestrian and landscape-wise, generating a more territorially balanced city”.
Not only in the case of the Parque de Ventas, but also in the Paseo Verde del Suroeste -with a naturalized promenade connecting the Casa de Campo with the Puerta del Ángel and Madrid Río- and the Parque Castellana -to provide the northern end of the Madrid block with a greener, more connected space designed for the citizens-, according to the consistory.
Other neighborhood battles
In another part of the city, the neighbors of San Blas-Canillejas are immersed in their own fight over the inconveniences caused by the Metropolitano’s large concerts, such as high noise levels, crowds and mobility problems.