July 30, 2015.
THE BLAZE COULD be seen from the village square. It began well on into darkness on the last evening of the fiesta. The verbena – the concluding dance session – was in full swing. The music stopped. The flames loomed ghastly above the village. El Fortín, that pleasant place of resort, was going up in flames – and the fire engine was away on other fiery business, didn’t get back till Tuesday according to Clemente.
I was in London, met Clemente first day back, a whole fortnight later, he coming up with his donkey through cinder-black earth and gaunt black pines on the far side of El Fortín. Ruined, all ruined. Clemente has olives on the slope opposite again, maybe three kilometres away, beyond the brook coming down from the ermita, the local hermitage, and his olives were all OK.
‘All the young men, the mozos, came running up from the village and fought it with branches and brooms, all night long.’ It had been a hard, heroic fight, said Clemente, while the village held its breath. How far would the fire reach, what would it destroy this time?
The last big fire, two years ago, stopped just on the other side of El Fortín. It’s maybe 400 metres from our home. We had a house full of children and I stayed up all night watching the flames shoot up behind the trees on the crest, aghast, in case we had to run for it.
‘They got it this time’, said Clemente, shaking his head. ‘This time they got El Fortín.’ The general theory, now as then – the primordial and permanent theory for all local fires – and for most forest fires in Spain – is that it was arson. Maybe. It’s hard to see any clear financial motive, but possibly pyromania rules. That’s the belief.
‘Yes, they really got it. You have to feel sorry for the resin gatherers. Plot No. 1 had 5000 trees they were tapping and they lost them all – months and months of work’. All this year the resin men have been working in their pre-allocated plots, each marked out from its neighbour by bright red and white plastic strips from tree to tree at waist height. They hack off quite a big rectangle of bark low down on the side of each tree and attach a small bucket into which the resin drains through a little beak-shaped spout dug into the tree.
‘The resin buckets were going off like bombs’, says Clemente.
I feel sorry for the old folk who foregather – or used to – at El Fortín in the evening, many climbing up past our house, past the spring flowing into its stone trough, and on ten minutes or so till they reach the trees and the stone benches set out among them. The pines are mostly ‘mansos’, the ‘tame’ pines grown by commercial forestry interests, horrible things really though most local people have got used to them. But at El Fortín there was also a real treasure – the old autochthonous pine tree, Pinus sylvestris L. This is as red as a Scots pine, twisty and delightful. Specimens have become a bit of a rarity now. The ones at El Fortín get special mention in a book called ‘Singular Plants of the Sierra de Gata’ – an honour for the village. A few have survived the fire, as has a whole belt of greenery below the summit on our side of the hill, relieving what would have been a horror to look at. But the big trees above are charred and will be clear-felled.
Fellers are already at work on the slope where I met Clemente, three men and a car with Portuguese number plates, soot covered, working away with chain saws. Down come the trees, kerplaff. Nobody calls ‘timber’, I suppose they keep an eye out for each other, though the bases of the bigger trees kick up as high as a man’s head when they fall. ‘The boss bought the plot green’, says one of the men when I call a good morning to him, as if to ward off the suspicion that el jefe had bought the burned trees cheap after the blaze.
Well, I’m sorry for the old people; I’m sorry for the resin gatherers; I’m sorry for the one or two people by el Fortín with goats – they now have to take them much further for pasture, right over to the unburned slopes beyond the brook – and I’m very sorry indeed for the people on the way down to the water who have lost their small, well-tended olive groves, another of the great treasures of the Sierra de Gata.
And I’m sorry to say I’m sorry for myself. Normally, I walk through the area several mornings a week, down and down to the brook and up the far side for the wide mountain views. It’s land I cherish. I know in my walker’s bones each rut in the track and by my walker’s eyes scores of individual trees, the way the light is soft and broken in the early morning, flattened by summer mid-day. But sadly though I walk today, it just may be a good thing that a quantity of the manso pines have gone. There’s talk of replanting in local hard woods, oak and chestnuts. This may well be a pipe-dream, as it was over the last Fuente Fría fire – it’s the expense of course. But at least the undergrowth will green up quite impressively within two years. Shame if the manso pines come back, self-seeded.