(Pumarejo de Tera) Everything that was spared in June is burning. Barely a month after a gigantic fire, the Spanish province of Zamora (north-west), is once again facing the flames in the face of which its inhabitants feel helpless.
Posted at 6:56 a.m.
The column of smoke can be seen for thirty kilometers around and merges with the clouds. The sky is an unreal color. The horizon is blocked and the smell, that of burning.
Antonio Puga cries as he watches the desolate landscape, “desperate and helpless” in the face of the flames in his small village of Pumarejo de Tera. “We could have avoided all that…”, laments this sixty-year-old.
Opposite, the flames devour the fields, making them crackle. The wind continues to turn, suggesting there a respite while here, it revives the embers and ignites the pines that we thought were spared.
The firefighters’ helicopter continues for half an hour during its ballet, from the river to the fields, dropping its water on smoky land.
Under the threat of a blaze with multiple outbreaks which has already consumed thousands of hectares, nearly 6,000 inhabitants of around thirty localities in this very rural area have had to abandon their homes since Sunday.
It was here, near Zamora, that the first two deaths were recorded in the wave of fires that have been ravaging Spain for a week: a firefighter who was battling the flames near the village of Losacio and a shepherd, whose the body was found in the nearby town of Escober de Tabara.
“Already too late”
In June, a first fire had already caused nearly 30,000 hectares to go up in smoke in this “Sierra de la Culebra”, close to Portugal and known to be one of the largest wolf reserves in Europe. Either the most important fire in Spain since 2004, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
If they lend a hand to the firefighters by carrying the hoses or by filling the water tanks of their tractors, the inhabitants, bruised by two fires in one month, are very upset against the authorities and the relief.
“The firefighters arrived late, the helicopters were there this morning, then they left at 3 p.m. and now we only have one,” denounces Antonio Puga, audiovisual technician.
“They keep saying they are overwhelmed,” continues Alberto Escade, a 48-year-old technician, who laments to see the three red trucks already leaving. “They arrive and then they say: ‘here, it’s already too late, it’s lost’. They are instructed to take care of inhabited areas”.
“But they say it themselves: this is not how the fire will be extinguished,” he concludes, throwing buckets of water on the roof of one of the many wine cellars in the region. On fruit trees, fruits that are still green are petrified.
Local authorities are content to explain that they give “priority to human lives”.
“Forgotten Spain”
The former mayor of the village Isabel Blanco, 52, is also upset. A month ago, the fire had ravaged one side of the road, she explains, pointing to the charred vegetation on the right. And now it’s the other one.
With lip service, she also recognizes that the firefighters were “a little late in coming” and sees in this the sign of a disrepute of “forgotten Spain”, this rural Spain victim of depopulation like the province of Zamora , which is a recurring political theme in the country.
In Zamora, thousands of people are preparing to spend the night, the second for some, on a camp bed in the reception center set up for the evacuees. Many refuse to speak and do not know if their house escaped the flames.
On vacation at his grandparents’ house, Daniel Santamaria, 21, says he had to leave in a hurry, carrying only a backpack, while “the smoke-filled raindrops made black spots as they fell”.
A few meters further, Luis Rivero, 76, will not forget “the wind, so strong, which carried away everything in its path” and which fanned the flames.
A 36-year-old beekeeper, living in Escober de Tabara, Laura Gago, she has “not yet had the strength” to go and see her 700 hives, but estimates, strangled by sobs, that “90% of her production has burnt”.
“We can’t do anything against nature, the wind, the temperatures, the drought,” she says, dejected. “Climate change is here, and there it is. He’s not going away.”