**2. Area of Study: The Green Areas and the Urban Parks in Tarragona**

The city of Tarragona is part of an urban area with nearly 380,000 inhabitants, with 16 municipalities and a surface area of just over 350 square kilometers. In 2019, the municipality of Tarragona had a population of 142,859 inhabitants, who, when distributed over the 57.88 square kilometers of their municipal area, represent a density of 2.468 inhab./km2. However, this average value does not reflect the internal inequalities, since the city has a clear "oil stain" layout, with a consolidated and densely populated urban center and a polarized periphery [31].

The Catalan Urban Planning Act (revised text of 2010) establishes that the urban structure of the municipalities is made up of general and local systems, the facilities and a system of free public places. The system of free spaces includes parks, gardens, green areas and spaces for amusement, leisure and sport. The urban green system is usually formed in the urban fabric in a series of isolated elements that can have an important ecological value with respect to the continuity of habits. Therefore, the linear elements, such as walks, park ways or linear parks, behave similar to connectors, complemented by the tree-lined roads in the urban section. The interconnection between parks, gardens and interstitial spaces makes up a comprehensive green mosaic that increases biodiversity and implies an improvement in the quality of the public space.

The Tarragona Municipal Urban Planning Plan (2013) defines the municipality's system of free spaces in a broad sense. According to this document, this system includes the public parks and gardens, the ramblas (boulevards), squares and all the free, public green spaces located on urban, urbanizable or non-urbanizable land. Agenda 21 Local in Tarragona considers urban green to be the city spaces where natural elements penetrate in the form of parks or gardens, which are tree-lined, with water bodies or garden elements in the streets.

Between the years 2012 and 2017, the Environment Department of the Tarragona Town Hall quantified a total of 65 green areas intended for public spaces, totaling 371 Ha of urban green (3.71 km2). These areas include the green spaces that are part of the urban section [32]. Out of this group of green spaces in the city of Tarragona, 14 were defined as urban parks [33]. These are distributed throughout the municipal territory, except in the residential estates in the east (Figure 1). These public facilities respond to very varied typologies, from landscaped urban squares, such as the Sant Antoni park, just over 1200 m<sup>2</sup>

or 0.12 hectares, to extensive areas of natural vegetation, such as the fluvial part of the Francolí river, of 13.7 hectares.

**Figure 1.** Location of the urban parks in Tarragona. Source: Own work. Orthophotomap base map 1:5000 of Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia.
