A dozen have already undergone a facelift, eight are under construction, seven will start this summer and another three next fall. The city council of José Luis Martínez-Almeida, which three years ago made a commitment with Ciudadanos to reform 21 squares in the city, will remodel a total of 28 spaces during the legislature. The latest to join the list, as ABC has learned, are the squares of Jacinto Benavente and Olavide, in the center of Madrid, and the Plaza Mayor de Barajas. There are no more details of his metamorphosis yet; “The projects are not finished,” say municipal sources.
The ten that are already finished, after the work carried out by the Works and Equipment Area throughout the capital, are the squares of La Cebada, Spain, Cristino Martos, Emilio Jiménez Millas, López de Hoyos, Duque de Pastrana , Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Benet, Bordeaux and the square between Zarza and Risco de los Claveles streets.
Another seven are being executed: the Puerta del Sol and the Remonta, Tamayo and Baus, Gabriel Lobo, Felipe II, Marqués de Salamanca, Pilar Parish and Alfredo Mahou squares. In summer, work will begin on the squares of Ágata and Mayor, Emperatriz, Vaguada, Mostenses, Quintana, Islas Azores and del Carmen. The latter is the only one whose transformation depends on the Environment and Mobility Area.
The consistory has also stopped the eleven places in peripheral neighborhoods that, in June 2017, the former mayor Manuela Carmena announced that she would put out to tender. However, the reforms never started and, when the current government team arrived at the Palacio de Cibeles, it only found “eleven winning ideas”. “Nothing else, the projects had not even begun to be drafted,” they advance from the Works and Equipment Area, which this Wednesday will inform the rest of the municipal groups of the state of these eleven enclaves in the commission.
The remodeling of four of them (Plazas de la Remonta, Ágata y Mayor, Vaguada and Emperatriz) is already under way. The rest, however, remain in limbo, either due to their infeasibility (Plaza del Encuentro and Plaza de los Misterios), or due to waiting times for urban planning procedures (Duquesa de Osuna, Lucero, Mar de Cristal and San Blas), or because the construction of a car park has postponed the works (Plaza del Puerto de Canfranc).
From the area they cannot provide the total budget for the 28 reforms. Some are millionaires, such as the Plaza de España, which has cost the municipal coffers 60 million euros; others, such as Felipe II, amount to 2.3 million euros. Many are associated with other actions and the item allocated to the square itself is not broken down. And in the last ones the budget has not yet been closed.
