In the case of a dense and compact city such as Barcelona, finding large green spaces is an added difficulty. This lends even more value to the more than 8,000 hectares of Collserola Park. The park’s presence ensures quality of life for Barcelona’s residents but its maintenance poses a challenge.
History
The Collserola range was declared a nature park in November 2010, when the decree declaring the area to be a protected space was published in the The Official Journal of the Generalitat of Catalonia. It is managed by the Collserola Park Consortium.
Biodiversity
There is a wide diversity of natural environments in the more than 8,000 hectares, much of which is occupied by Mediterranean forest. Almost all of the Mediterranean’s fauna are found there, thanks to the combination of woodland, cultivated land, dry grassland and maquis shrubland.
Despite the fires that cyclically afflict the Mediterranean woods, and the steady replacement of holm oaks with conifers such as pine trees, holm oaks are still the most typical tree found in the Collserola range. Near the holm oaks (Quercus ilex) and English oaks (Quercus robur) there are field and Montpellier maples (Acer campestre and Acer monspessulanum), and large stretches of riverbank woodland alongside the gullies and fast-flowing streams, with a lots of white poplars (Populus alba), black poplars (Populus nigra) and narrow-leaved ash trees (Fraxinus angustifolia). The fruit trees include hazel (Corylus avellana), pomegranate (Punica granatum) and wild cherry (Prunus avium). You can also find Chinese weeping willows (Salix alba) and elms (Ulmus pumila). Shrubs there include chaste trees (Vitex agnus-castus), common hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna), strawberry trees (Arbutus unedo), laurustinuses (Viburnum tinus), Mediterranean buckthorns (Rhamnus alaternus), Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and ivy (Hedera helix).
Landscaping and Design
Collserola offers a large diversity of landscapes. This is partly due to the heavy pressure of human life. Such pressure has given shape to a mosaic of spaces that combines woodland areas with agricultural spaces, meadows, maquis shrubland and so on.
The lay of the land, which covers the city’s entire northern edge, acts as a frontier and marks out the city between two large, natural elements: the sea to the south and the mountain range to the north. This large, longitudinal park, which is what the range represents for Barcelona, has the potential to be a large, green space in contact with the urban network as well as the starting point for a whole series of green corridors that join the city to the sea. A union that can be clearly seen from Montjuïc to the west, but which is feasible from the river Besòs to the east and also from the city centre via several urban parks. These corridors connect spaces running from Parc de la Ciutadella and the seafront’s linear parks up to Parc de les Aigües, Parc del Guinardó, Park Güell and Parc de la Creueta del Coll, to name a few.