Do you know what Calalberche is or where it is located?
Well, it is an urbanization that belongs to the City Council of Santa Cruz del Retamar, in Toledo, Spain, in the Autonomous Community (CA) of Castilla La Mancha (CLM). Go to our City Council website and check that there is nothing published about DANA, even though we have been declared a catastrophic area. The city council hides our reality and misery. It is 20 kilometers from us and they spend their taxes on what suits them (parties, paellas, bullfights, etc.) to avoid losing votes, while here they invest the minimum.
The CLM autonomous government also ignores us. Mr. García Page, president of the CA of CLM, has demonstrated his lack of humanity and his contempt for those in need. Here he has not appeared during or after DANA. He has not allocated a single cent to alleviate the misfortunes that occur here due to that storm. Our representative at the City Council, during the information meeting on October 1, stated that, when requesting help from the Provincial Council of Toledo, they responded that they were unaware of the existence of Calalberche. I think it is the strongest proof of how much we matter to the politicains of the goverment of CLM.
Calalberche is not an illegal or slum neighborhood. We have our infrastructures, but they are all obsolete. We pay our IBI, our garbage tax, our clean point, our town hall delegate office on time. We paid for our local police until they took that public service away from us. We pay for our consumption of non-potable water, extracted from the Alberche River, abandoned by the Confederation of the Tagus. Water distributed by a network with sections of asbestos, which constantly explodes when there is an increase in pressure so that the water reaches the top; We also pay for our drinking water tanks, which are constantly emptied in summer, due to the overgrowth of the population, which goes from 1,500 to about 7,000 inhabitants in summer. We pay for our sewage network that does not absorb water, but vomits it out; We pay for our water treatment plant, which does not allow the residents of Río Alberche Street to live, due to the bad smell it gives off. We pay our road tax on poorly paved streets, full of potholes and without decent sidewalks, when there are any. We pay our licenses to remodel or build our homes or fix them, etc. All of this adds up to more than 1,000,000 euros annually that the Santa Cruz del Rematar City Council pockets.
Calalberche has the misfortune of having been designed without a future projection. It is encapsulated within a territory without its own access to the outside. Where urbanization ends, we are in a strange land. One exit is the extension of Geneva Street, which belongs to the Aldea del Fresno City Council, which belongs to the AC of Madrid. Another is the Camino Villa del Prado, belonging to Méntrida of the AC of CLM. This means that any work on these accessories must be paid for, in part, by the town councils of Aldea or Méntrida. They have been refusing to sign agreements for decades so that we have roads or highways passable by all types of vehicles, while these two towns maintain their businesses, in part, thanks to the money that the residents of Calalberche leave buying in their stores, supermarkets, gasoline, veterinarians, doctors, dentists, post offices, banks, schools, municipal pavilions, etc.
After DANA (September 3 and 4), Calalberche was caught in a mousetrap. After the collapse of the base of the La Berciana bridge on Geneva Street, our public transport stopped providing service to Aldea and Madrid. All traffic, from September 4, including school traffic, must pass through Camino Villa del Prado: most of it is 3 meters wide; curves, poorly marked, where wild boars can cross at night; full of potholes, when they are not puddles of water with large potholes hidden by water, which destroy the wheels or the chassis of your vehicle. Now, all types of vehicles circulate through it, in addition to the school bus and the regular passenger bus, stopping traffic, because they cannot cross paths with another vehicle, due to the narrowness of the passage.
On October 18 they “reestablished” our bus service, but with only four daily departures/entries and two stops in the lower part, along almost 45 kilometers of streets. Which means that those who live on steep slopes have to climb 1.5 km because there is no stop at the top. Before, the 548 was a service of the Transport Consortium of the AC of Madrid, we paid €1.50 to get to Aldea. Now, despite being a catastrophic area, the CA CLM forces us to pay €1.30, although on the first day they charged €1.40, to get to Méntrida, in addition to having to make two transfers before arriving in Madrid.
With the latest rains, the streets near the Alberche River continue to be flooded, but there is no project to sensibly collect the rainwater. (To be continue)
