With the number of passenger vehicles rising across Europe, cities are grappling with air pollution, traffic accidents, and the loss of public space. In Spain, the city of Pontevedra has managed to overcome these challenges, surpassing national air quality standards and creating safer streets. The key, according to the Galician municipality’s mayor, is an urban model that prioritises residents over cars – without imposing an outright ban on private vehicles.
It is a bright summer evening in Pontevedra, a Galician city in the northwest of Spain. The air is filled with a contralto accompanying a live jazz show in a corner of the big town square. A few metres away, four teenagers play soccer with an orange ball that two younger children try to touch in vain. A family takes a selfie while, seated on a nearby bench, four elderly women are engaged in a lively conversation. The intervals between one jazz piece and another are filled with the chirping of birds that are attracted to the greenery around the fountain.
Looking at the images of Pontevedra from the 1990s, with lines of cars stretching as far as the eye could see, it would be very difficult to predict a future like this. But since family doctor Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores was elected mayor in 1999, the Galician city has been implementing policies that go well beyond regulating vehicles in its streets. The goal, according to the 71-year-old mayor, is to recover public space for the people.
“When we reclaim public space and guarantee universal accessibility, then people have autonomy,” the mayor says. A politician of the Galician Nationalist Bloc party (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, BNG), Lores is now serving his seventh mandate and is willing to run for an eighth in 2027. Galicia is mainly and historically ruled by the right-wing Popular Party, and is the birthplace of several of its national leaders, which makes the local leftist and nationalist BNG’s long rule in Pontevedra an exception in the region.
When we reclaim public space and guarantee universal accessibility, then people have autonomy.
In December 2022, the Spanish government approved a royal decree requiring all municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to have a Low Emission Zone (LEZ) in operation. To improve air quality for citizens and reduce carbon emissions, the decree recommends measures such as restricting access for more polluting vehicles based on their environmental label and introducing traffic-restricted areas where entry charges apply.
Spain adopted this measure to comply with the legally binding requirements of the Paris Agreement – the international treaty on climate change – more than six years after it entered into force in November 2016.
Nevertheless, since Pontevedra was already fully complying with the air quality parameters laid out in the national Law 7/2021 on Climate Change, the city council decided to take a much more ambitious step: declaring the entire urban area (about 490 hectares) as a “reduced traffic zone”.
On a sunny, fresh noon at the end of June in his city-centre office, Lores recalls what Pontevedra looked like when he first took up his duties: “It was literally a cars’ warehouse and people, especially those with disabilities and the elderly, couldn’t go out on the streets, because everything was occupied by vehicles.”
While he speaks, the mayor mentions the 19th-century Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer, best known for the urban reform of Barcelona’s central Eixample neighbourhood, with its distinctive grid layout and symmetrical structure. Just like Cerdà, he views public space as an extension of the home.
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