The city of Porto is hosting an “international conference on forest fires” from Tuesday. Portugal has it… It is one of the countries most in Europe by these fires because in particular of the eucalyptus.
On June 17, 2017, on a scorching hot day, the firefighters’ siren sounded in Castanheira de Pera, a town in central Portugal. A fire. Then several, all fanned by a violent swirling wind. Rui Rosinaha, a volunteer firefighter, puts on his suit and sets off on the road: he will find himself trapped with families fleeing their homes.
“I had never seen a wind like thishe remembers for franceinfo. Amidst the smoke, we saw a first family, three adults and a 4-year-old child. We put them in the middle of us, on the ground and we hugged them. There is a person who had his foot burned: nothing serious. But all the firefighters had second and third degree burns.” he remembers.
>> Portugal: return to the “road of death”, scene of a deadly fire in 2017
Since then, fear never leaves him because he says, “I live in a wooded and abandoned region of Portugal”. Here, a tall, slender tree is singled out: the eucalyptus. The tree, imported from Australia, is planted in rows for miles to make paper. This flammable tree, explains forest engineer Paulo Castro, has replaced 26% of the Portuguese forest. “When there is a fire, the eucalyptus projects leaves, pieces of bark several kilometers away. We sometimes think that it is an arsonist who sets fires in several places. In practice, these are secondary fires caused by the combustion of eucalyptus”, he explains.
In Portugal, the timber industry is worth billions of euros
Sandra Carvalho owns hundreds of hectares of pine and eucalyptus. “Eucalyptus is the most profitable. People are so against it, but can you tell me what was THE product that everyone put in their shopping cart when the pandemic started? Toilet paper. How could we make All that paper without eucalyptus? Medicine boxes too? It’s almost impossible to live without it!”
Eucalyptus monoculture – which replaced more fire-resistant local species – played a tragic role in the 2017 fires. But so did rural exodus. Today, in this region, a multitude of private plots, formerly exploited, are abandoned without any maintenance. The fire, when it occurs, picks up speed and power.