ON Saturday, the inhabitants of Paüls will celebrate the feast of their patron saint, Sant Roc, with a mass, followed by a common meal eaten on stone tables, Who Folk dance and a feeling of deep and persistent relief.
Forest fires last month – which transformed the night sky an infermatant orange, blackened the surrounding hills and devoured 3,300 hectares (8,154 acres) of land – was a quasi -discuste that elected memories of the 2009 fire to Horta de Sant Joan, who killed five firefighters.
“People were afraid that everything is burning and that they will lose everything,” explains Enric Adell, the mayor of the small Catalan mountain town. “They were afraid of being trapped and not being able to get out of the village.”
Fear of a fire like that, he adds, is like no other type of fear.
“We have gone through a pandemic and a reduction in power on a national scale and torrential rains, but a fire at this scale was something else – just like the consequences,” explains Adell.
In the hills above the village square, the charred trees recall what could have occurred without the bravery of hundreds of firefighters, including Antonio Serrano, lost his life. Change the winds and luck have also played a role.
“When a fire strikes,” explains the mayor, “he really leaves his mark.”
This summer fires have already left their mark over the entire length and width of Spain, Galicia and Castilla Y León in the northwest to Catalonia in the North-East, intelligent suburbs outside Madrid towards the extremities of the South West, and to the Tarifa beaches in Andalucía.
In addition to panic and increasingly familiar smoke flavor, this year’s fires brought a feeling of already seen with them.
The hot and deadly summer of 2022 gave images that threw the vulnerability of Spain naked when the effects of climate emergency have become simpler. Images that went around the world in July have shown that Ángel Martín, a 53 -year -old man from Tábara to Castilla y León, using one of his excavators to try to stop the fires of the Culebra Sierra reaching the city. In the video, the machine is engulfed by the flames before Martín moves away from hell, the clothes burning his frame. Martín, a very popular figure in Tábara, suffered 80% burns of her body and died in hospital three months later.
Three years later, Spain is again on the defensive.
“Fires are one of the parts of the impact of this climate change, which is why we have to do everything we can with regard to prevention,” the country’s Minister of the Country, Sara Aages, in Cadena Ser Radio, said this week.
“Our country is particularly vulnerable to climate change. We now have resources, but, since scientific evidence and general expectations indicate that it has an ever -increasing impact, we must work to strengthen and professionalize these resources. ”
On the Emergency Climate Front line
While politicians engage in blame games, experts warn, once again, that all quarrels on the number of water degradation planes are lacking. The current series of fires, they add, was entirely predictable and underlines the need for a fundamental redesuit of land use and management on a continent which is on the front line of climate urgency.
“This year’s fires are essentially at the same level as those we saw in 2022 and 2023,” said Marc Castellnou, head of the Forestry of the Catalan regional fire service and fire analyst at the University of Lleida.
“Since 2017, we have seen this change to more extreme fires … It is not new – and it happens because climate change brings higher temperatures for much longer periods.”
Dynamics are not difficult to discern. If you have annual heat waves that arrive one after the other – and last more and longer – in a country where decades of rural depopulation have left enormous areas of non -recorded land, invaded or granted to homogeneous culture, you will then have massive fires which become more difficult to fight. As a Spanish scientist noted it earlier this week: “We have all the ingredients of the Molotov cocktail that we see at the moment.”
Cristina Montiel, professor at Madrid’s Compluten University and forest fire and land fire expert, says that if Spanish firefighters and other emergency services do “extraordinarily magnificent” work that maintains much more large disasters, the problem lies in society as a whole.
Despite annual fires and the abundance of evidence, she says: “It turns out that we are not – and we do not want to be – aware of the danger in which we live”. If we were even a little aware, she adds: “We make measures and decisions to protect us”. Fifty years ago, said Montiel, most forest fires were intentional. But today’s forest fires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and propagate so voraciously because of two factors: the change of landscape and climate change.
It is an explosive combination. The heavy spring rains of this year led to an increase in plant growth which has now been dried by successive waves of heat, leaving all this fuel vegetation, a large part in the neglected areas, ready to serve as fuel for fires. The situation is still complicated by the phenomenon of “flash droughts”, which can quickly dry agricultural land still very irrigated, and which should become more common as global heating continues.
Paüls is an example. Its population has decreased over the decades and fewer and fewer people in the region work on earth due to economic awards in narrowing.
“If there were 100 people who worked on the ground before, there are now 30,” says Adell. “If the same policies continue and things remain as difficult as they are, then in a few years, there will be almost no one.”
After promoting the newsletter
All these years of abandonment had left ravines, ravines and invaded pine forests and made them time -activated time loops. The fire of last month, said the mayor, was simply uncontrollable: “We saw that there was no way to stop him.”
If there is a lot of truth in the idea that preparation is everything – and in the old maxim that “fires are issued in winter” – the challenge now lies in decades of negligence and bad planning that have seen the landscape forgotten and the appearance of housing in dangerous places.
But Montiel warns that the essential redesigned will be neither fast nor easy.
“If things have taken a turn for the worst 50 years ago, we can now start to change them for the best,” she said. “But you cannot think that starting to change things now will be paid in two sums because it is not true. These things are processes.”
‘Fire Flocks’ of sheep and goats
However, there are already signs that the message passes. After Horta de Sant Joan’s fire 16 years ago, a group of shepherds approached the Catalan fire service to ask what they could do to prevent more flames.
The result was the Fire herds (Fire Flocks) Diagram, in which the shepherds coordinate with firefighters to graze the herds of sheep and goats in high density areas of undergrowth and therefore a high risk of fire.
In areas eliminated by ruminants, firefighters have better access and, as there are fewer undergrowth, it is also easier to control fires if they burst.
“We do not need more helicopters or firefighters,” explains Marc Arcarons, who coordinates the initiative, which was launched in Girona in 2017 under the aegis of the Pau Costa foundation for non -profit. “We could buy 200 additional helicopters and that will not solve the problem. These are prevention and management. “
The program also helps shepherds to increase their existing income because those who participate can sell their meat or cheese to a premium as certified focus, so that consumers know that products contribute to the preservation of the environment and to the survival of traditional agriculture.
About 120 shepherds joined the project, which covers around 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) in Catalonia. Similar diagrams are planned or underway in the Canary and Andalucía Islands.
Arcarons says that depopulation – and the decrease in dependence on wood for building materials and grazing since the 1960s – caused what was once a patchwork of vineyards, Gowers olive and wheat fields to return to a dense forest.
Rapid and very flammable dominated pines, the undergrowth have prospered and this, combined with climate change and more frequent and longer periods of drought, has led to extremely difficult fires.
“It’s like a fireplace,” says Arcarons. “If you continue to throw wood on the fire, the fireplace will set fire and the house will burn.”
Castellnou is appropriate that without adapting our landscapes to the realities of climate rupture, we calm our fate.
“There is no point in talking about more planes,” he says. “If we limit our ability to put out fires by thinking that we just need enough equipment to turn them off, we create an unsustainable artificial situation for summer after the summer of extreme time.”
