SOCIEDAD MUNICIPAL DE APARCAMIENTOS DE LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA SA
Almudena Suárez is the Head of External Funding in our organization and plays a key role in the SPINE project. She is responsible for identifying, managing, and coordinating external funding opportunities, ensuring alignment between project objectives and funding requirements. Within SPINE, she supports proposal development, oversees compliance with funding frameworks, and works closely with partners to secure resources that enable the successful implementation and long-term impact of the project.
Our organisation became involved in the SPINE (Smart Public Transport Initiatives for Climate-Neutral Cities in Europe) project as part of its strategic commitment to sustainable urban mobility, climate neutrality, and innovation in public space management. As a municipal company with experience in mobility services, parking infrastructure, and intermodal solutions, SAGULPA contributes practical, city-level implementation capacity to the project.
Within SPINE, our role focuses on the development and implementation of intermodal mobility hubs, particularly through the deployment of bicycle stations located near public bus stops, facilitating seamless transitions between transport modes. These hubs are further reinforced by the integration of solar trees, providing renewable energy to power the infrastructure while enhancing urban resilience and sustainability. This approach aligns SPINE’s objectives with real, scalable solutions for climate-neutral cities, grounded in the everyday mobility needs of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
SPINE brings significant added value to our organisation by providing a structured European framework to test, implement, and scale innovative mobility solutions in a real urban environment. The project allows us to move from isolated pilots to integrated, data-driven interventions aligned with climate-neutral city objectives.
Through SPINE, we strengthen our capacity in intermodality, sustainable infrastructure, and renewable energy integration, particularly by linking public transport, cycling, and smart urban assets such as solar-powered hubs. In addition, the collaboration with European cities and technical partners enhances our internal knowledge, improves access to best practices, and reinforces our expertise in managing externally funded innovation projects.
Overall, SPINE helps SAGULPA accelerate its transformation from a traditional mobility operator into a key urban innovation actor, delivering measurable environmental impact while creating transferable solutions for other cities.
Our organisation plays an implementation-oriented and demonstrative role within the SPINE project, acting as a local enabler for sustainable and climate-neutral mobility solutions. SAGULPA contributes its experience in managing urban mobility infrastructure to translate SPINE’s strategic objectives into real, operational interventions in the city.
Specifically, our role focuses on the design, deployment, and operation of intermodal mobility hubs, integrating cycling facilities with public transport nodes, particularly near bus stops. These hubs are supported by renewable energy solutions, such as solar trees, ensuring energy autonomy and reinforcing the project’s climate-neutral approach. In parallel, we collaborate on data collection, monitoring, and evaluation to assess the impact of these solutions on mobility patterns and emissions reduction.
Through this role, SAGULPA ensures that SPINE delivers tangible, replicable results, grounded in the daily mobility needs of citizens and aligned with the long-term urban mobility strategy of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
By the end of the SPINE project, we aim to have successfully implemented and validated intermodal mobility solutions that contribute directly to climate-neutral urban transport. For our organisation, this means having fully operational intermodal hubs combining public transport, cycling infrastructure, and renewable energy, demonstrating their feasibility, usability, and environmental impact in a real city context.
We also hope to achieve a measurable reduction in emissions, increased use of sustainable transport modes, and improved connectivity between different mobility services. Beyond the physical infrastructure, SPINE is expected to leave a lasting legacy in terms of knowledge, data, and organisational capacity, strengthening our ability to design, finance, and scale innovative mobility projects.
Ultimately, our goal is for SPINE to provide replicable models and evidence-based solutions that can be extended within Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and transferred to other European cities, reinforcing our role as a proactive contributor to the transition towards climate-neutral mobility.
