“So much work to do this botch.” The first neighbor we find is conclusive. “How can it be that the tiles are broken on the first day?” The truth is that Avenida de la Constitución was opened to the public on Saturday. The City Council announced it in a statement on Friday. And it was striking that the consistory itself illustrated the ad with some images in which there were still machines and operators working on the ground. The idea was to open the new most important pedestrian axis in the center, which runs between Avenida de Alfonso X el Sabio and the Portal de Elche, coinciding with the disembarkation of the thousands of tourists who have arrived during Holy Week.
The work has cost 1,479,191 euros, and involves the pedestrianization of the axis of Constitución Avenue and Bailén Street and the upper part of Castaños, the “afternoon” street, which has been mostly pedestrian for years. The City Council speaks of a “continuous pedestrian corridor between the Central Market and the Explanada de España”, although the market is on the other side of one of the avenues with the most vehicle traffic -Alfonso Sabio- and in the last stretch, that of the Bilbao street, plans to establish a “vehicle-pedestrian shared platform”.
Faced with criticism and the evidence that many tiles are broken, the City Council defends itself by ensuring that the opening on Saturday was anticipated by Easter, and that the work will not be received until it is in perfect condition. It remains to be seen if the municipal technicians will accept a pavement that has numerous cracks and that the breakage in many of the corners and profiles of the tiles has been patched with cement.
It was also surprising that Mayor Barcala, aware of the controversy surrounding the removal of 23 large trees (melias) that shaded the avenue, praised, however, the transformation of the central avenue because now it is possible to “appreciate the beauty of many of the facades of the buildings on this central avenue”, in an unexpected attempt to turn a lack into a virtue. The melias have been replaced by young banana trees, one of the most common trees in Alicante, which will take time to reach the size that obstructs the view of the facades.
Another of the criticisms that the work has received is the lack of coherence between the pavement and the lighting of the complex, since the design of both is different on Bailén street, with which Avenida de la Constitución connects. We are talking about a promenade of just over 500 meters, in which different types of soil and different lampposts have been used, with different aesthetic criteria.
The truth is that this is not the first time that Grupo BertolÃn, the company that has carried out the work and which is one of the usual ones in public works in the city, has been involved in controversy. The firm was awarded the renovation of Padre Esplá, the main avenue in the Pla Carolinas neighborhood, and in addition to accumulating a significant delay and increasing the cost by 20%, going from the initial 2.3 million to 2.8, the neighborhood has reported poor execution.
The BertolÃn Group also won the contract to reform San Mateo street and, recently, that of Jijona avenue, a contract that amounts to 2.5 million euros
