Esther Valdés Tejera is a Ph.D. Landscape Architect, with more than ten years of experience as a lecturer and researcher and over 25 years in professional practice. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Red List of Heritage of Hispania Nostra.
She received her Bachelor’s degree at the School of Fine Arts in the Complutense University of Madrid. She did a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture and Landscape design at the Politécnica University of Madrid. She defended her Ph.D. at the same university, with the topic: “The aesthetic appreciation of the landscape: nature, artifice, and symbol” and received the Best Thesis Award in 2017.
Since 2019, she has been the Director of the Urban Management BA at the Camilo Jose Cela University in Madrid and a lecturer at the Master in Historical Gardens and Ecosystem Services of the Green Infrastructure at the Politecnica University of Madrid. She has been a lecturer in different programs since 2006 at San Pablo CEU University and Politécnica University of Madrid, among others. Her main research topics and publications are about aesthetics and landscapes and the relationship between environment, culture, and identity. In 2018 she did a three-month research stay at the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University in Boston.
Esther Valdés Tejera is co-founder of Gamberaia Jardines, a landscape architecture firm established in 2001 which develops projects for private gardens, public space, and consulting. As a volunteer, she is currently the Vicepresident of the Spanish Association of Landscape Architects, and has been a member of the International Federation of Landscape Architects’ European branch since 2003.