Every winter, the streets of Barcelona are filled with orange spots. Oranges grow on more than 3,000 trees in the city; some fall to the ground, others dry on the branches. They are part of the city's landscape but, for some years now, they have gone from being an anecdotal decorative element to being the ingredient of a product that is a symbol of how cities can feed us: La Marga, the bitter orange marmalade that sprouts from Barcelona's orange trees.
There are more than 3,300 orange trees in the city — 1.5% of Barcelona's more than 200,000 trees. More than a third are concentrated in a single district: Sant Andreu. And it was there that the initiative emerged, which has now spread to eight districts and mobilizes hundreds of people every February to collect fruits that, for years, simply ended up on the ground.
The idea came from the citizens: when the City Council was working on the Urban Agriculture Strategy 2019-2030, it opened the process to residents, and the question arose as to whether it was possible to take advantage of the fruit from public trees. "Many people asked to what extent an entity or a person could collect this fruit," recalls the Urban Agriculture technician of the Municipal Institute of Parks and Gardens, Mireia Abril.
That question from the citizens led to many more, and the legal aspects of the project were studied, as well as the sanitary ones. The Public Health Agency of Barcelona began to analyze the oranges to see if atmospheric pollution or soil characteristics could compromise the quality of the fruits; it was found that no, the oranges, although bitter, were perfectly edible.
To give a second life to those fruits, the answer came from the Fundació Espigoladors. Until then, the entity was dedicated to recovering agricultural surpluses in the fields to combat food waste. With this project, it transferred this same philosophy to cities.
"Espigolar is a traditional practice that consists of recovering food that would remain in the field, always with the permission of farmers; we adapted it to cities, and thus urban espigolades were born," highlights the director of the foundation, Raquel Díaz. Everything took shape in 2021 with a pilot test in Sant Andreu, which has been replicated year after year, adding more districts, more entities, and more volunteers in each edition.
Now, every winter, volunteers, schools, institutes, and neighborhood entities traverse the city streets for a week equipped with poles to collect bitter oranges. The oranges, however, cannot be eaten freshly picked. Their intense bitterness forces them to be transformed, and this is where Espigoladors' social workshop, Es im-perfect, comes into play.
In this space, as Díaz explains, about thirty people work, and twenty of them follow socio-labor insertion itineraries, which gives the first (and not the only) social character to the entire initiative. In the workshop, the oranges are cleaned, peeled, cooked, and packaged until they become La Marga.
Afterwards, the jam is labeled, and the second social leg of the project arrives: La Marga is not commercialized, but rather distributed by social entities in the territory. "Since the fruit comes from public trees, it is a common good, it cannot be sold," Abril asserts. For this reason, jars of La Marga reach soup kitchens, solidarity pantries, residences, or entities that work with people in vulnerable situations, which are chosen from each district.
In fact, each district is responsible for the transformation and subsequent distribution of the oranges it has collected, and also assumes the cost of doing so — which ranges between approximately 6,000 and 13,000 euros. The budget is allocated to the production of La Marga, and also to educational workshops aimed at diverse groups, ranging from schools to people with disabilities or migrants.
“We do around 35 workshops annually,” and they allow us to go beyond cooking and food utilization, as Abril explains: “In Ciutat Vella, for example, we work with migrants, and they explain how they use oranges in their countries, sharing recipes and points of view. It is an opportunity for cultural exchange.”
With the collection figures for this February just closed, the initiative continues to grow. This year it surpassed 680 volunteers —more than a hundred more than the previous year—, and collected 5,042 kilos of oranges, from 413 trees in the city. 45 entities participated, such as schools, facilities, neighborhood groups, and associations, in a year in which 36 workshops were held with 486 participants. Since the beginning of the initiative, more than 14,000 jars of La Marga have been produced and distributed throughout the territory to more than seventy entities.
In fact, Barcelona's experience has already begun to attract interest beyond its streets. Espigoladors promotes similar projects in 19 Catalan municipalities, adapting them to the characteristic trees of each territory. If bitter oranges predominate in Barcelona, in other areas they recover olives, carob beans, or plums, as Díaz details. The objective is to demonstrate that cities can also be productive spaces and that urban trees can play a more active role in the circular economy and food utilization.
Now, the City Council is working on delving into the legal terms of fruit collection from the city's trees, while exploring more ways to take advantage of the fruits Barcelona produces. Meanwhile, in February, the poles will once again rise among the branches of the orange trees, as a symbol of the utilization of the city's resources and how to value them. In this case, in the form of jam.