Redeia’s subsidiary company Red Eléctrica, which is responsible for operation and transmission of the electricity system, has taken part this last Thursday in the IV Day of Forests for schoolchildren from the Llevant area of Mallorca at Sa Duaia (Artà), the public estate which was reforested with the support of Red Eléctrica after the fire it suffered in 2013.

As part of the celebration of the International Day of Forests, which was held on 21 March, and the agreement between Red Eléctrica and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment to fight against forest fires, which was renewed on 20 February, Red Eléctrica offered transport to Sa Duaia for nearly 450 fifth and sixth year pupils from ten primary schools in the towns of Artà, Son Servera, Capdepera, and Sant Llorenç des Cardassar. 

The schoolchildren took part in an awareness day on the importance of forest conservation that was organised by the Forest Network of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment, with the support of technicians from the department, Ibanat (Balearic Nature Institute), and environmental technicians from local councils and Red Eléctrica.

The activities focused on four areas: How can we protect our forests from fires? How are we working for the future of our forests? What do our forests produce? What creatures live in the forests and how do they relate to each other?
To take advantage of the direct contact with the environment, the objective of the day was:

- To highlight the risk of recurring fires, which cause the processes of erosion and desertification, degrading the land and destroying the area’s biodiversity.
- To showcase the forests in the Llevant area, so that people appreciate them and know why they are important.
- To make the children of the province feel at home in this space and collaborate to recover and protect it.
Red Eléctrica has been working together with the Government of the Balearic Islands since 2013 in the fight against forest fires and for the conservation of the environment, and as part of its national programme ‘the Red Eléctrica Forest’, it was involved in the reforestation of the Sa Duaia estate in 2014 and 2015. Red Eléctrica helped to restore thirty-six hectares of the estate by planting 12,000 specimens of native species such as pine, wild olive, and evergreen oak.

Besides the replanting, there were also educational programmes in collaboration with the secondary schools in the Llevant area and the creation of the walking route for ‘The Red Eléctrica Forest‘, a public footpath marked with informative panels that runs around the estate of Sa Duaia-Es Recò and the reforested areas.