Palms harming ronda traced to Mutxamel

The story is about a road, not really about trees. The palms planted years ago in the median of the CV-821 — the ronda linking San Vicente del Raspeig, Sant Joan d’Alacant and Mutxamel — ended up pushing the pavement upward with their roots. That turned a landscaping choice into a safety and maintenance problem. (informacion.es) The news is that the regional government has already removed the offending palms and moved on to repairing the damaged carriageway. ### Which road are we talking about? It’s the CV-821, the ronda that connects the area around San Vicente, Sant Joan and Mutxamel and helps feed traffic toward bigger routes like the N-332 and the A-7. This is not some minor access lane — it is a key connector used by thousands of vehicles a day, which is why damage in the median quickly becomes everybody’s problem. (informacion.es) ### What exactly did the palm trees do? Their roots lifted and deformed the road surface. Basically, the palms were planted in the central median, and over time the root system expanded enough to warp the asphalt and damage curbs. That kind of heaving creates bumps, weak spots and a rougher, less predictable surface for drivers. (informacion.es) ### Why trace it to Mutxamel? Because the first concrete intervention happened there. The Conselleria removed the 67 palms in December and did the work in coordination with Mutxamel’s town hall, which then received the transplanted trees in two municipal areas — near the ermita de Montserrat on Paseo de la Alameda and around avenida de España. (informacion.es) So Mutxamel is where the road problem first turned into an actual removal-and-relocation operation. ### Why remove them instead of just pruning roots? Turns out this was already beyond light maintenance. Once roots have deformed the carriageway, you are not just managing vegetation — you are rebuilding a piece of road. Cutting roots can also destabilize mature palms. (informacion.es) Removing and transplanting the trees let crews tackle the underlying pavement damage directly. That is the practical logic here. ### What work came after the removal? The next phase was road repair. The regional government moved on to fix roughly 5 kilometers of the ronda, including treatment of the outer lane that had been deformed by the roots and then resurfacing that lane. In short, the tree operation was only step one; the real goal was restoring a safer, flatter road. (informacion.es) ### How big is the project? The total investment tied to the improvement works is 390,000 euros. The article also says the repair phase was expected to last about two weeks. For a problem that sounds cosmetic at first — trees in a median — the bill shows how expensive it gets once infrastructure starts moving under traffic. (informacion.es) ### Why had this become such a long-running issue? Because the road has been important since it opened in 2003, and local councils had been pressing for repairs for years. The ronda was built to improve links among these municipalities and connect them better to major roads. When a heavily used connector starts buckling, complaints pile up fast — and they keep coming until somebody funds a full fix. (informacion.es) ### So what’s the real takeaway? The lesson is simple: roadside landscaping can become a road-engineering problem if the planting choice is wrong for the space. Here, the palms did not just look out of place — they physically damaged the CV-821. The authorities’ answer was to move the trees, repair the asphalt and stop the same root problem from keeping the ronda in a cycle of bumps, patching and renewed risk. (informacion.es)