Society

Porto Municipal Plant Nursery: cultivating Porto's urban forest

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The Municipal Nursery of Porto produces over 600,000 plants per year, thus providing the impetus for a gradual greening of the city of Porto and the entire Metropolitan Area.
This grows indeed the seeds of future planting!

The Plant Nursery is located in Campanhã and covers an area of around 7 hectares. The possibilities offered to the environment by this local public entity are numerous and the benefits are already showing; for example, the Municipal Nursery grows circa 300 different types of camellias and the population can be provided trees and bushes for free to plant their gardens, which also encourages the principle of domestic horticulture and engages people on the value of trees and plants.

It is a fact that more than 50 percent of the world's population now lives in cities, and now more than ever, land use planning strategy has to have in consideration the resulting environmental impacts of urbanization, which are often intensified by climate change and include increased pollution and frequency of extreme climatic events. Porto City hall is no strange to this and is undertaking a Public tree planting in the city.

In fact, since 2017, Porto City Hall set an innovative plan to plant trees in public spaces, which are grown at Porto Municipal Tree Nursery. There are now 14 new areas, the so-called Biospots, distributed along the main roads, in a total of 17 hectares.

Porto Biospots Network is part of the Native Urban Forests of Porto (FUN PORTO) program, in the framework of the "100 million trees planted in Porto Metropolitan Area" project. The network is intended to mitigate some of the negative impacts and social consequences of urbanization, and also to make cities socio-economically and environmentally more sustainable, as part of the City Hall's sustainable environment strategy.

By 2021, around 10,000 trees are expected to be planted in the city public spaces, thus contributing to offsetting climate change, by removing air pollutants that can trigger respiratory illnesses, reducing storm water run-off, keeping the city cooler during the summer and providing shelter and food for birds and other wildlife.

This ecologically oriented initiative is in line with the municipal strategies for the Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change Programme, and is developed in the context of the FUTURO - project of 100,000 trees planted in the Metropolitan Area of Porto.

The objective of this project is to plant more than 100 thousand trees in Porto Metropolitan Area (AMP) by 2021; and the good news are that that goal has already been fulfilled due to the strong commitment of all the municipalities in the Metropolitan Area of Porto.

Seventeen municipalities of AMP have participated, engaging around 16 thousand volunteers who have contributed to reforestation and environmental sustainability, "eight years and 100 thousand trees later".

Porto Municipal Plant Nursery is located at Rua de Areias, in the eastern part of town. It features greenhouses that extend across 6,500 square meters and grows circa 10,000 perennial plants per year and during the feast of Saint John, the Municipal Nursery provides around 6,500 "manjericos", the traditional bush basil of the feast.