SOURCE: IDEAL DE GRANADA NEWSPAPER (8/03/2023)

AUTHOR: INÉS GALLASTEGUI AMIAMA

PHOTOGRAPHY: PEPE MARÍN

Businesswoman and nature lover, Victoria Carreras presides over the Marjal producers’ group, with a triple environmental, social and economic objective.

The economist Victoria Carreras (Granada, 1968) is the founder of the ANDA Cowork space, but for the last three years she has combined this activity with the management of poplar cultivation in the meadows of her family’s farm. At the head of this farm she learned about the problems faced by a traditional sector in the province – poplar wood was already being used for construction in the time of Al Andalus and Granada became the leader in Spain in its cultivation – but which has been losing ground due to lack of profitability, since this material is mainly used for the manufacture of fruit crates and as biomass, products with little added value.

Hope for the populiculturists -with some 4,000 hectares, mostly in the Vega and in the northern part of the province- came from the European project of the University of Granada LIFE Wood for Future, which aims to improve the quality of wood to transform it into beams and other structural elements in sustainable and industrialized construction.

Victoria became president of the Marjal group in May, which brings together 73 producers with 1,400 hectares of poplar groves and is already preparing for an upcoming expansion. “I was very flattered that my colleagues who share the same problems trusted me, because traditionally this is more of a man’s world,” she admits.

In barely a year, the tables have turned. “The choperos have been isolated. Belonging to the group allows you to be with people who do the same as you and find a helping hand,” he explains. “The objective is to professionalize the sector, because we invest a lot of time and money and it is important that, after ten or twelve years, when we cut our poplar trees, we make sure that the work has been done well. In the group we have advice on forestry to obtain quality, certified wood, and the producers, with a single voice, are reaching places we could not even dream of before,” he explains.

The institutions are already showing interest in promoting the recovery of poplar groves and supporting the creation of an industrial ecosystem by applying the knowledge developed at the UGR: the next launch of a spinoff is planned to be installed in the San Isidro Sugar Factory and last week the Andalusian Government announced the construction of the first poplar wood building, a development of 30 apartments for young people in the Azulejera.

A nature lover since she was a child and with a vocation for mountaineering – “Always with a camera in her backpack”-, for Victoria poplar trees are more than just a profession: they are also a familiar landscape that roots her to the land. And they also fit in perfectly with her business philosophy through the “green revolution”.

The entrepreneur from Granada chairs Sannas, a national association that brings together companies with the purpose of change and in transition to the triple bottom line: environmental, social and economic. Because, in addition to economic profitability, populiculture is a crop rooted in the territory and capable of fixing population in depopulated rural areas, without forgetting its environmental and systemic advantages as an agroforestry crop: poplar trees capture a large amount of CO2 and particles from the atmosphere, cool the temperature, filter polluted water and generate biodiversity.

As a woman leader of an exciting project in a traditionally masculine world, Victoria is proud, but she is a bit skeptical about the achievements of current feminism: in her opinion, the macho violence suffered by many young women is a symptom of failure.

“I am a university graduate and in my professional life of more than 30 years I have never stopped doing things because I am a woman. But I am aware of the great responsibility we all have as a society to achieve the much-needed paradigm shift,” she says.