The Spanish government has started to dismantle the iconic Navacerrada ski resort to restore the mountains, but lawsuits have delayed the plan.
(Bloomberg) — José Conesa felt no hesitation as he surveyed the bare slopes of the the Guadarrama mountain range in late October. Conesa runs the Navacerrada ski resort and was certain nothing — not the lack of snow and certainly not the Spanish government’s plans to dismantle the resort— would prevent it from operating this winter.
After all, Navacerrada had been welcoming skiers since the 1940s, and the central government has been trying to shut it down for years, including in each of the past three seasons. Spain’s Minister for Environmental Transition, Teresa Ribera, called it “an occupation without a license and therefore, illegal.”
Just 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Madrid, Navacerrada is a small but iconic spot held dear by the hundreds of thousands of Spaniards — including the country’s most famous Olympic skiing champions — that have touched snow on its slopes. It sits at the heart of a fraught dispute between authorities that want to turn it into a national park and locals who see it as a major source of income. The battle has become an example of the tensions that arise when efforts to restore nature clash with economic interests and even long-standing traditions.
“The government is turning its back on reality if it thinks that with their attitudes they’re benefitting the environment,” says Conesa, one of the partners of Puerto de Navacerrada Estación de Esquí, the company operating the resort. “We don’t just exploit a sports installation, we maintain it and take care of it — if we weren’t doing that, the result would be catastrophic.”
The Spanish government sees it differently. Rising temperatures and a dearth of snow mean the resort’s slopes can only operate if water is pumped in from a nearby river and turned into artificial snow — a solution the government says is unsustainable over the long term. In 2022, rainfall was about 15% lower than historical average.
Warming in this area of Spain didn’t happen overnight, but it has been relentless. Average temperatures in Navacerrada have increased by 1.6C since measurements started in the 1950s, according to data from Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET compiled by Bloomberg Green. The Guadarrama mountain range has warmed 1.2C since 1980, according to researchers at Universidad Complutense in Madrid, compared to 1.1C for the planet since pre-industrial times. In other words, this part of Spain has warmed as much in 40 years as the as the average increase for whole world over 100 years.
There was no significant snowfall in November or December, and the Navacerrada resort remains closed. Last year was the hottest year in Spain since at least 1975, according to the country’s meteorological agency Aemet. The year was 0.6C warmer than the previous joint warmest years, with average temperatures in December between 5C and 10C higher than usual, meaning that the weather during that mont was more similar to the average April than to previous December.
“The temperature increase in Guadarrama over the past two decades has been really notorious,” says Fidel González, an associate professor at the Department of Earth Physics and Astrophysics at Universidad Complutense in Madrid. “This is consistent with a global trend — continental areas are warming faster than the ocean and the coast.”
About 95% of ski resorts globally rely on snowmaking to either ensure good snow quality, prolong the ski season or both, according to Slippery Slopes, a report on how climate change is threatening the Winter Olympics by the Loughborough University in London. The snowless slopes are impacting professional sports too, with Winter Olympics organizers forced to choose host cities from an ever-shrinking pool. The winter games held in China earlier this year were the first to rely almost completely on artificial snow.
Warming had been on the Spanish government’s radar for years, so when the Navacerrada resort’s 25-year license to operate on public land expired in 2019, the government decided not to issue a new one. Instead, it announced plans to turn the slopes into a national park — a more viable option in an increasingly snowless Spain, and a cheaper way for the more than 7 million people living in the Madrid metropolitan region to enjoy nature.
But those plans were immediately challenged in court by two different regional administrations — part owners of some of the land — and the resort’s owners For the past three years, the case has been entangled in a complex legal battle. The section of the resort sitting on the Castilla y León region is awaiting a verdict from the regional court there, with no indication of when a decision could be made. The area in the Madrid region, meanwhile, depends on two different towns restarting the process to issue a new license to operate.
Spain’s Ministry for Ecological Transition declined several requests for comment on the legal dispute and on the government’s plans for the area.
In October, workers following government orders started tearing down two ski lifts, the first step in the administration’s plan to dismantle old installations and abandoned buildings. Setting up visitor centers and clearing hiking trails are also on the to-do list.
Conesa says the transformation will wreck the local economy. The resort employs about 200 people every season, but virtually all economic activity in villages in the area depends on Navacerrada and Valdesqui, a second resort nearby, according to Conesa, who was once the mayor of one of these villages. “Even if they don’t ski, people come to see the snow and they buy, eat or sleep around here,” he says. On an average Saturday in winter, Conesa estimates Navacerrada attracts between 8,000 and 10,000 people, 300 of whom are skiers.
Changes in the local climate can be compensated for with technology, he says. The resort was the first in Spain to install artificial snow sprinklers and cannons, and it can produce snow even when temperatures are as high as 2C (35.6F). This year the resort will open again, Conesa says — as soon as there’s some snow.
Closing down is not just an economic problem. Ribera, the Minister for Environmental Transition, acknowledged the decision’s “emotional impact” in an op ed published in the El País newspaper last year. The resort was a pioneer “during grey times in which skiing was a gulp of fresh air and modernity,” Ribera wrote in reference to the political repression the country endured during four decades of dictatorship.
Ribera, a hiker, argued that the mountain’s future is still one in which nature and sports are intertwined — but it needs to be sustainable.
For some local activists, this is the culmination of a decades-long campaign. Felix Sánchez, a veteran cross country skier, has fond memories of learning to ski at the resort — yet he is working to close it down. “For us Madrid city boys, the Guadarrama mountain range was the first point of contact with nature, and with the freedom that comes with it,” says Sánchez. But in 1993, Sánchez chained himself to an excavator to protest installation of pipes, snow sprinklers and cannons that would bring artificial snow to the resort.
Sánchez points to the pine trees and a nearby stream as he walks up the mountain toward the dismantled ski lifts. “This is a jewel, a luxury,” he says. Rusty metal poles lie on the ground, ready for the scrap yard. “Expanding [the resort] made no sense back then and to keep going with it now is going against nature.” Sánchez is now a member and a spokesperson of Ecologistas en Acción, a non-profit that has advocated for the dismantling of the resort for decades.
Uncontrolled crowds of city dwellers keen to enjoy nature are a threat to the environment, Sánchez says. The hundreds of cars that drive through the mountain’s narrow roads on the weekends emit greenhouse gases that worsen air pollution in the area. That, coupled with the smog of the capital nearby, means ozone levels in the Guadarrama mountains are sometimes higher than in the city center.
The gold standard for mountain restoration that Sánchez is hoping for, and that Ribera and her ministry are pursuing, is just a valley away. Valcotos, a ski resort that closed down due to lack of snow during the 1990s, is now the Peñalara National Park.
“The mountain was wrecked, we tore down 30 buildings and 10 kilometers of cables,” says Juan Bielva, who oversaw the project as director of conservation for the Peñalara National Park. “The main difficulty was that there was no precedent in Spain — or anywhere that I could find, for that matter — for a project like that.”
Dismantling ski lifts was easy, even if some large poles had to be carried down the mountain by helicopters, he says. What was hard was restoring the endemic vegetation. Bielva and three biologists set out on a quest for seeds in the valleys nearby, picking them one by one. When they realized that was too slow, they collected cow droppings with seeds embedded in them. But even that wasn’t fast enough for an area of 340 square kilometers (210 square miles). Eventually, Bielsa ended up asking trucks that were clearing fire lanes in forests nearby to drop the soil on the resort’s valleys.
Restoration still took 15 years and cost about 5.5 million euros ($5.8 million). The project employed the resort’s former workers, who planted over 100,000 trees and bushes on the old slopes, cleared a country ski trail, several hiking trails and a space where people can slide down on sleighs and organize snowball fights when there is snow.
“We know climate change is happening and there’s less and less snow,” says Bielva, who is 74 and still lives close to the national park. “We need to transform. We can’t keep living out of things that are disappearing.”
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