Barcelona’s plane trees: the city aimed for 15% by 2027. On its streets they are still 27.7%

Which tree stands outside your door? Often a plane#

40,123 of the 145,034 trees the city counts along its streets are plane trees (plàtan d’ombra, Platanus × acerifolia), the tall trees whose bark comes away in grey, yellow and green plates. There are about half as many hackberries (lledoner), the next most common street tree.

In the Eixample and in Sant Martí two street trees in five are planes (39.7% and 40.2%). Lit in green on the map, they trace Cerdà’s grid, the Diagonal, the Gran Via and the Meridiana almost on their own.

Why the city wants fewer of them#

The city’s tree plan for 2017–2037 says no species should make up more than 15% of its trees, so that one pest or disease cannot strike a large part of them at once. The plane is the only species above that line.

Its pollen matters too. The Catalan aerobiology network says plane pollen causes a great many allergies at the start of spring, in a short and very intense season of three to five weeks. At the same time the previous year’s seed balls break up, and the hairs around the seeds irritate eyes and throats; that part is irritation, not allergy.

The 2027 target, quarter by quarter#

In May 2022 the head of the city’s tree department told Europa Press that plane trees should be no more than 15% of the city’s trees by 2027. The figures given with it were those of the street register: 42,709 planes among 154,235 street trees, 27.7%. The ceiling itself is older: since 2011 the city has said no species should pass 15% of its street trees, and its tree plan sets the 15% objective for 2037; the 2027 date comes from that interview.

The street-tree register the city publishes every quarter shows what came next. Its latest edition (July to September 2026) lists 40,123 planes among 145,034 trees: 27.7%. In all 35 quarters since 2018 the share has stayed between 27.4% and 28.3%. Counted over all three registers, with squares, gardens and parks, it went from 20.0% to 19.8%.

Plane trees are going. So are other trees#

The planes have gone down. Across the city’s three tree registers (streets; squares, gardens and other green spaces; parks) there were 46,575 planes at the start of 2022 and 44,002 now, about 570 fewer a year.

The share barely moves because the street register shrank too, from 154,236 trees to 145,034. Part of that is bookkeeping: at the end of 2023, for instance, the trees of several squares in Sant Martí moved from the street register to the green-spaces one.

At the street register’s pace of the last four and a half years (about 580 fewer planes a year), planes reach 15% of street trees around 2058, and 15% of all registered trees around 2045. In May 2026 municipal sources gave the press a new aim: 12% by 2037, which betevé described as removing half the planes in ten years. Read against street trees, at the same pace 12% comes around 2066; to arrive in 2037, the number of registered planes would have to fall about four times as fast as it has.

Where planes disappeared from the registers, and where new ones appeared#

Compared tree by tree with the registers of early 2022, 2,623 planes have left all three lists and have no plane within 5 m today (orange on the map). 612 new planes stand where there was none before (white).

The biggest losses are in the Zoo (288), on the Gran Via (111), the Diagonal (89), carrer de València (77) and the Meridiana (75). In the latest register, 2,599 of the 2,623 spots have no tree of any kind within 2.5 m.

The Diagonal has more plane trees than in 2022#

In the same 2022 interview the head of the tree department expected the works to join the two tram lines along the Diagonal to bring an “important” drop in plane trees, with hackberries, pagoda trees, chinaberries and tipu trees in their place. The first stretch, from Glòries to Verdaguer, opened in November 2024; the city announced 266 new trees there and said 89 trees had had to be removed.

The Diagonal had 2,679 planes at the start of 2022 and has 2,756 now.

172 planes on it are new to the register. 132 of them stand between Glòries and Verdaguer, the stretch rebuilt for the tram, and 79 of the new ones carry a planting date of March 2025.

Consell de Cent went the other way#

When Consell de Cent became one of the Eixample’s green axes, its planes went from 351 to 302 while its total number of trees rose from 985 to 1,081. The new ones are mostly sweetgums, ornamental pears, crab apples and ginkgos.

The trees on your street#

Type a street, or tap any tree on the map. You get every tree the city lists on that street, how many are planes, and how many planes it had at the start of 2022.