Nuestros árboles son nuestra riqueza. No a la fábrica de biomasa

The slogan Nuestros árboles son nuestra riqueza. No a la fábrica de biomasa condenses San Esteban’s conflict over forest use into a claim of collective belonging: the trees are a local inheritance, not merely fuel or saleable timber. Displayed among posters opposing the biomass plant, it gives the campaign a memorable refrain while exposing the unresolved question beneath it—who may claim the forest’s value and authorize its use.

The slogan in the Caribe

The posters hang throughout the Caribe, a bar beside the marina where Bea, León, and a Civil Guard friend of León’s meet for drinks. Bea remembers the Caribe as a place where she and her sisters spent their adolescence playing billiards and discovering alcohol. Its familiar walls now carry a different kind of local history: opposition to the proposed biomass plant. Alongside the slogan are messages insisting that clean energy should not come at any price and that the community should not be stripped of what belongs to it.

The contrast between the bar’s youthful past and its present political display makes the campaign part of everyday village life rather than a debate confined to officials or environmental groups. The posters address people in a familiar social space, presenting the trees as a shared source of wealth and the plant as a threat to that inheritance. Pacheco, the bar’s owner, voices the same resistance, saying that the sawmill should not be allowed to get its way and that the forests belong to everyone.

Competing meanings of biomass

The slogan’s opposition is tested in Bea’s disagreement with Débora at the sawmill. Débora calls the biomass plant a way of stripping the forests. Bea counters that it is supposed to use mainly wood residue, brush, and other organic waste: in her account, clearing the forest and giving neglected woodland a new use is not the same as destroying it. The slogan therefore speaks to a real dispute over what counts as forest care, not simply to a settled division between people who value nature and people who do not.

That disagreement also involves political trust. Débora asks whether the mayor has already persuaded Bea, and insists that the plant will not be allowed to go ahead. Bea, in turn, sees the project as advanced and questions why it provokes such hostility, contrasting it with dependence on oil. The posters’ categorical refusal stands against this practical defense of biomass, which presents the plant as a source of clean energy and a new use for woodland material.

Timber rights and local stakes

The forest dispute becomes concrete when a man shows Bea’s family a map and identifies their location as two hundred metres north of forest track seven. He says that the timber across the surrounding hectares belongs to the sawmill: some is destined for the biomass plant, while suitable wood will be made into planks. When the family objects, he says the timber was bought from its owners and that the purchase included the right to extract it. The slogans’ language of collective possession thus meets a competing claim grounded in purchases and timber rights.

The conflict is not resolved by the posters’ appeal to shared wealth. Bea tells Débora to summon members of her tree-chaining association and bring the press, hoping to make as much of a public disturbance as possible; Débora hesitates. Meanwhile, Irene argues to two landowners that the sawmill is paying well for their timber and has even offered to buy the parcel for short-rotation forest crops. She also raises expropriation and conversion to public woodland as an alternative, while assuring them that the municipality would not pay as much as the Andrada family. Set against these competing proposals, Nuestros árboles son nuestra riqueza. No a la fábrica de biomasa is both a protest slogan and a claim about ownership: it insists on the community’s stake even as private sales, extraction rights, municipal power, and the proposed plant divide the people affected.