Ayuntamiento de San Esteban

Ayuntamiento de San Esteban is the municipal government that backs Irene’s ambitious biomass project, making local development policy a source of both political hope and public division. Through its support for the proposed San Esteban Biomass Plant, the municipality becomes entangled in disputes over forest use, land rights, political pressure, and the credibility of claims about green energy. What begins as an argument over the value of a new industry escalates into a crisis for Irene’s administration when landowners’ allegations and a televised investigation put the project under national scrutiny.

Municipal backing for the biomass project

Irene distinguishes her role from direct involvement in the plant: she says that she is not personally involved in it, but that the project has the support of the Ayuntamiento de San Esteban. At this stage, the facility produces pellets for boilers; the larger plan is to develop it into a power plant. Irene promotes that expansion as a way to generate employment and produce electricity for 50,000 people, while making use of what she describes as otherwise unusable wood and forest waste.

Her case for the project joins environmental and economic promises. Irene argues that locally produced biomass electricity could reduce dependence on fossil fuels, including gas and oil, and make the area a pioneer in Spain. In her account, protecting trees and generating energy are compatible goals: the wood business can expand while forests are cleaned and given a productive use. She also points to the Andrada family’s decision to enlarge its timber business, crediting the son-in-law with an important part in that change. Her confidence in the project makes the municipality’s support seem to her not a betrayal of local identity but a commitment to progress.

Forest use, ownership, and competing interests

That confidence is contested from the outset. Débora calls the biomass plant a threat to the forests, while Irene replies that its feedstock is chiefly wood remains, scrub, and other organic matter. Their disagreement reflects a wider conflict in San Esteban: supporters describe the project as a source of jobs and cleaner energy; opponents fear that it will encourage the depletion of woodland. The plant’s proposed benefits therefore depend on competing interpretations of what forest management means and who should decide how local land is used.

A confrontation at the forest makes those questions concrete. When a man identifies the area on a map as land whose timber belongs to the San Esteban Sawmill, he explains that some will go to the biomass plant and usable timber will be made into boards. He says the owners sold the wood and that the purchase included the right to extract it. Bea disputes the claim that the trees belong to the family, then urges Débora to bring people from her anti-plant association, along with the press, to make a public protest. The scene shows how the project’s supporters can appeal to legal purchase and timber rights while opponents understand the same extraction as a threat to a shared landscape.

Irene also discusses the possibility of land acquisition in her municipal office. Speaking with two landowners over a map, she argues that the timber company is paying well for their wood and offering to buy their parcel for short-rotation forest crops. She adds that the land could instead be expropriated and made public, but claims the municipality would not pay the owners as much as the Andrada family would. This proposal gives her position a politically fraught edge: even as she presents purchase as advantageous to the owners, she invokes municipal expropriation as an alternative. Later, when a newspaper reports that she threatened two owners with expropriation unless they agreed to sell their trees, Irene insists that she would never expropriate land. She cites her refusal to expropriate land beside a motorway, which led to the road being diverted, as evidence that coercion is not her policy. The contrast between her earlier argument and her later denial becomes central to the dispute over her conduct.

Allegations and political accountability

The newspaper story damages Irene’s standing by presenting the land dispute as a case of a mayor pressuring residents for the benefit of the biomass project. Pacheco tells Bea that Román, Irene’s former husband, is supplying him with information. The article reports the allegation about threatened expropriation; Pacheco also plans a further story about the family’s protest in the chestnut grove, drawing on information attributed to Spain’s Civil Guard and accompanied by photographs. At a family gathering, Irene is furious that the story may be published and asks Jacobo why his colleagues have spoken. He explains that one of the landowners is the father of his colleague Juanjo, who spoke after learning about the alleged threat to his father.

Irene’s response reveals how personally and politically she experiences the reporting. She wants the planned story stopped and asks Jacobo to get his colleague to retract the account as a misunderstanding. She worries that Bea’s treehouse could become a symbol against the power plant, joining a specific family conflict to the larger public campaign. Bea agrees to speak with Pacheco, taking Débora with her so that the journalist will hear from someone who opposes the plant but believes this particular report is untrue. The municipality’s supporters and opponents thus do not divide neatly into fixed camps: disagreement over the project does not automatically settle whether an allegation about Irene is accurate.

Televised scrutiny and the widening crisis

Irene accepts an interview with Rebeca Ramos, despite Bea’s warning that the journalist may not treat her fairly. The recording is scheduled for the day before the demonstration, which Irene expects to attract only a small crowd. Instead, Rebeca challenges the project’s environmental and economic claims in detail. Her questions concern the emissions from burning biomass, the fossil fuels used to transport forest material by truck, the disposal of ash, the amount of woodland needed to supply a large plant, and whether promised jobs and public subsidies make comparable facilities viable. Irene has answers, but the interview’s pace and accumulation of counterexamples leave her struggling to defend the project convincingly.

The questioning then turns from the plant’s general merits to the agreement behind it. Rebeca presents an iPad copy of an agreement changing the plant’s specifications. Irene says she knew nothing about the changes; the journalist uses the document to argue that the plant is pursuing profit at the expense of residents’ health and that Irene’s government has made it the symbol of its policy. Irene angrily protests that Diego changed the emissions terms without consulting her. Her allegation shifts the crisis from a disagreement over the project’s public value to a question of whether a business partner altered its safeguards while the municipality continued to support the plan.

The interview transforms the scale of the political problem. Irene laments that national media will come to cover a demonstration that might otherwise have passed almost unnoticed, and says that her political career is over. On the day of the protest, cameras follow Bea through the streets as the demonstration proceeds; she sees Rebeca reporting from its midst and connects the spectacle to the danger facing Irene’s mayoralty. The municipality’s campaign for a local development project has become inseparable from a national media event, with the plant, the land dispute, and Irene’s credibility framed together before a much larger audience.