The authorization of a cremation area at the M-40 funeral home is rejected by the residents of the neighborhood, who already have to deal with the contamination of three sewage treatment plants and a storm basin.
Almeida authorises a crematorium in Usera that Madrid City Council has rejected three times
The view from the hill where the slides and swings of Manzanares Park are located is dominated by the blueish glass that covers the colossus of more than 13,000 square meters that is the M-40 funeral home, on Rosales Avenue. Last week, the funeral services of the Parcesa company also obtained authorization to build a crematorium with a capacity of more than 1,000 cremations per year. This proximity between the common areas of the neighborhood and the polluting industrial activity, which will be added to the sewage treatment plants, the rainwater basin and the gas substation already existing in the area, is what most worries the residents of the neighboring neighborhoods of Los Rosales, Butarque. and mainly San Fermín.
“What was missing in San Fermín. If we were tired of the smell of the sewage treatment plant, now we also have to put up with the smell of the crematorium. Breathing in that smoke is quite unpleasant,” says Marimar at the door of the Mercadona, which is next to the funeral home, about the project that has been rejected three times by the city council. As you leave the supermarket, you will find a square with a children’s area in the center, one of at least four that are scattered along the Perales road, which ends at the M-40 and the funeral home.
“In the southeast of the neighborhood, there are already too many facilities. There is a gas substation 50 meters away, the treatment plants, a concrete building, the noise of the M-40 and the M-30. We swallow what is not written. They do not understand that, even if the emissions from the crematorium are low, we can’t take it anymore,” explains Mayte Pocero, from the San Fermín Neighborhood Association.
In this area of the Usera neighborhood and its surrounding streets, several facilities are installed, such as the wastewater regeneration plants – to filter urban waste and fecal water – La China, La Gavia and Butarque; the Butarque rainwater basin, which, by storing rainwater, can cause stagnation and decomposition; and a natural gas substation, where the resource is treated and distributed. Most of them are concentrated on the Perales road, which also houses the Caja Mágica de Madrid and is next to a crossroads of the M-40 and other kilometers of the M-30.
“They will wage war on us”
“The area already has noise problems from the highway, insect infestations and the smells in the area are bad because of the sewage from the Manzanares River and the sewage treatment plants. Now imagine a crematorium 200 meters from the nearest homes. What the authorities should do is move the crematorium to another location. In the south, we always get everything we don’t want. They’ll make us go to war,” says Diego, a resident of Los Rosales.
From Butarque, another border neighborhood, they also expressed their rejection. “We have been waiting for years for a health center that was a promise 20 years ago. The Los Rosales cultural center has been closed for more than a year, but the crematorium is maintained. 10 years ago we reached a compromise in which this was not going to be carried out and I do not understand why it is happening again now,” said the spokesperson for the Association of the Independent Neighborhood of Butarque.
The closest residential building to the funeral home, about 200 meters from it, is located at the intersection of Periana Street and Los Rosales Avenue, the latter surrounded by green areas with small children’s parks. The distance recommended by the Municipal Ordinance on Air Quality and Sustainability recommends in its article 22 that ovens for the cremation of corpses must be installed so that the distance from the emission source is not less than 250 meters from homes or places of usual contact. . people, such as offices, shopping centers or sports facilities, parks.
“What worries me most is how harmful it can be to your health,” Alex wonders before starting to exercise in one of the parks on Los Rosales Avenue. Cremation is fuel-intensive and produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to an article in NatGeo magazine. In the United States, the average cremation uses almost the same amount of energy and produces the same emissions as two tanks of gasoline in an average car, the study concludes.
Three years of searching for alternatives
Paloma, 56, is worried about the loss of property value that could result from having her house next to a crematorium. She says this from the only open terrace on the Perales road. In the rest of the establishments, the sign “closed for the summer” is hanging and the neighbors have not yet returned from vacation. The granting of the license in August surprised them and the associations are waiting for their arrival to call for a protest. “They will keep us standing; we will exhaust all the roads as we have exhausted them until now,” says Pocero de la Cruz, of the neighborhood association.
The text of the crematorium’s authorization consulted through this means indicates that “this license is granted in respect and execution of the final judgment issued on July 12, 2021” by the Supreme Court, to which Parcesa-Parques de la Paz SA filed an appeal against the resolution of March 30, 2016 of the Director of the Activities Agency, which had initially denied the authorization.
The explanations of the City Council and the Community of Madrid are limited to indicating that the decision “forced” the granting of permits and that the urban planning area spent three years looking into whether it could avoid this possibility.
