Cairo's Jamaat El Dewal El Arabiyah road is one of the city's busiest night-time playgrounds, with revellers, including Arab tourists, filling its clubs, restaurants and cafes year-round.
Many of them may not have noticed the street's grand old trees, which by day provided much-needed oases of shade during the Egyptian capital's summer months.
But not any longer: where the trees once stood are now mounds of earth and stumps and branches that have gone bone dry from days under the scorching sun.
Authorities say that the trees were felled this month to “develop” the road. But that has not stopped protests on social media and television talk shows.
The felling of Cairo's trees has been described as a “massacre” by critics, and an attack on the pockets of green that exist in the bustling Nile-side city. Environmental activists believe thousands of trees have been cut down over the past decade.
Some of the city's trees are more than 100 years old, and cutting them down “squanders an environmental value that's difficult to replace with young trees”, said Nader Noureldeen, a Cairo university professor who specialises in water resources. Old trees “develop an underground root network that enables them to independently secure their water needs”, he said.
The government says the trees must be cut to create space for wider roads, new overpasses and buildings.
Recent tree maintenance coincides with a construction drive overseen by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, whose years in office have seen the rise of some dozen new cities – including a new capital in the desert east of Cairo – and the building of thousands of kilometres of new roads, dozens of overpasses in large cities and massive sea resorts in virgin coastal areas.
Mr El Sisi has ordered all open spaces in Cairo to be turned green. State media and websites have repeated the announcement.
The uproar over the tree felling on Jamaat Al Dewal El Arabiyah is seen as unprecedented, mostly playing out on social media platforms as well as state and pro-government media.
In a widely cited comment, Cairo governor Ibrahim Saber vowed that no more trees would be felled and that even pruning them would be done only when absolutely necessary.
“We are putting in place mechanisms to implement this [Mr El Sisi's] initiative and how it will proceed,” he said. “We will increase green spaces and the number of trees and we will protect them.”
The Ministry of Environmental Affairs also stepped in, telling local councils across the nation not to allow trees to be felled except with written permission from the provincial governor.
The Environment Minister, Manal Awad, directed provincial governors to update the government on the implementation of a plan announced last year to plant 100 million trees nationwide.
