FIRE FIRE FIRE
(Part One and see Part Two below)
July 30, 2015. The blaze could be seen from the village square, well on into darkness. It was the last evening of the fiesta and 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 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 they 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. They have become rare 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 come down.
‘The boss bought the plot green’, says one of the men when I say good morning, as if to ward off the suspicion that he had bought the timber cheap after the fire.
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 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, it 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.
FIRE FIRE FIRE
Part two
Page one in El Pais, August 7, eight days after the El Fortín fire. This one is national news, a different scale entirely. The Sierra de Gata is ablaze, thousands of hectares gone already, fire out of control, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft bombing it with water.
I spot the news in London, on the net. The locus of the fire is between Acebo on the lower slopes of the mountain, extending all the way south towards Perales del Puerto, a village on the edge of the plain below, some ten kms by road. It’s burning right across the road to Fuente Fría which is duly cut. The firefighters are trying to chuck so much water at the fire before nightfall – when water bombing stops – that it won’t burn on so many fronts at once and they’ll be able to bring it under full control tomorrow. They hope. As well as fixed wing planes from Salamanca, to boost local firefighting helicopters, the army have arrived with their own terrestrial fire engines.
Page one in El Pais. August 8. The fire continues to burn, still on a national level, news-wise. The president of Extremadura, the socialist politician Guillermo Fernández Vara, says it is arson. There’s a map in the paper which shows – wrongly – that the main locus of the fire has moved east today, between the main road coming down from the mountains and Fuente Fría. I start to telephone people in the village. My first call gets no answer – owner no doubt away at the seaside. Blanca’s voice is low and dejected when I reach her. She and her husband have several smallish fincas down in the valley, in the direction of the fire – fincas round here are small farm plots for growing things and in their case keeping horses, a local passion. With the road cut, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening. It’s a disaster, it’s all horrible.
By nightfall August 9 I’ve spoken to Fernando – walking companion (and cork oak expert – see cork-stripping post, July 31, 2014). Everything is OK in his village but they can see the burned-out stretches of land below and they are huge.
When I speak to Fernando again, next day, it’s all change. The wind backed round in the night and the village was evacuated. The old people in the old people’s home and everybody else in the first-line of danger and need went first. Fernando and Flor, his wife, stayed back. They have a little finca with olives and a kiwi vine to offer shade beside a well all of 30 seconds from their house. Fernando’s precious tractor, patiently maintained and painted by its owner, was sitting near the entrance way attached to a trailer loaded with firewood. The flames are approaching the village rapidly. Fernando and Flor go down to the finca and stand guard. In the end the flames arrive. Fernando and Flor fight and fight, losing a couple of olive trees but saving the tractor and its load. But the fire is now definitively out, here and everywhere. That is the real news.
By chance I return to Spain next day and call in briefly on Fernando. He looks exhausted. He and Flor have been through the mill defending their land. On the night of the evacuation, they thought they were the only villagers involved in private fire-fighting. Next morning they found quite a few others had stayed behind for the same reason. Several houses up on the road through to Portugal are burned out. So are the two wonderful mountain slopes above the village, where he and Flor used to go courting and where he and I have lately walked together.
Nobody in the village knows the ways and byways of this part of the Sierra as well as Fernando does. He worked amongst them day on day when he was in the timber business, and now, semi-retired, he walks or cycles almost every morning. What’s gone is the physical setting of many of his memories – a serious loss for a man who is so local in all his impulses. Flor has a job on a bull-breeding farm- she hates bull-fighting, has never been to a corrida – but at least she has a double focus, the village and the farm 15 kilometres away, beyond the burned-out area. Menos mal, not so bad.
Vara the president, continues to say it’s arson and he will be looking for financial help from the government.
In our own little lives, we have discovered that the river pool in Perales, an old favourite, is in reasonable shape – thoroughly burned out above the pool but the trees on the bank itself and the space under them right by the river is still usable – and used. The pool is one of several on the little river coming down from Acebo, where the fire actually started, we have learned, and it’s dammed in summer to make a chest-deep swimming pool – a ‘piscina natural’, it’s called, a ‘natural swimming pool. Every sierra village has one. Because this is a granite range, there is running water all year round and that’s one of the reasons why the Sierra is so loved by the young in our own family. Two grandchildren came out with me from London and their young voices at the pool help to push the dismay and sense of loss provoked by the great fire into the background. Gaby will be back soon and life will return to normal.
FIRE FIRE FIRE
July 30, 2015. The blaze could be seen from the village square, well on into darkness. It was the last evening of the fiesta and 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 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 they 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 delightfuo. They have become rare 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, 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 come down.
‘The boss bought the plot green’, says one of the men as I say good morning to him, as if to ward off the suspicion that he had bought them cheap after the fire.
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 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, it 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.
Part two (for part one see below)
Page one in El Pais, August 7, eight days after the El Fortín fire. This one is national news, a different scale entirely. The Sierra de Gata is ablaze, thousands of hectares gone already, fire out of control, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft bombing it with water.
I spot the news in London, on the net. The locus of the fire is between Acebo on the lower slopes of the mountain, extending all the way south towards Perales del Puerto, a village on the edge of the plain below, some ten kms by road. It’s burning right across the road to Fuente Fría which is duly cut. The firefighters are trying to chuck so much water at the fire before nightfall – when water bombing stops – that it won’t burn on so many fronts at once and they’ll be able to bring it under full control tomorrow. They hope. As well as fixed wing planes from Salamanca, to boost local firefighting helicopters, the army have arrived with their own terrestrial fire engines.
Page one in El Pais. August 8. The fire continues to burn, still on a national level, news-wise. The president of Extremadura, the socialist politician Guillermo Fernández Vara, says it is arson. There’s a map in the paper which shows – wrongly – that the main locus of the fire has moved east today, between the main road coming down from the mountains and Fuente Fría. I start to telephone people in the village. My first call gets no answer – owner no doubt away at the seaside. Blanca’s voice is low and dejected when I reach her. She and her husband have several smallish fincas down in the valley, in the direction of the fire – fincas round here are small farm plots for growing things and in their case keeping horses, a local passion. With the road cut, it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening. It’s a disaster, it’s all horrible.
By nightfall August 9 I’ve spoken to Fernando – walking companion (and cork oak expert – see cork-stripping post, July 31, 2014). Everything is OK in his village but they can see the burned-out stretches of land below and they are huge.
When I speak to Fernando again, next day, it’s all change. The wind backed round in the night and the village was evacuated. The old people in the old people’s home and everybody else in the first-line of danger and need went first. Fernando and Flor, his wife, stayed back. They have a little finca with olives and a kiwi vine to offer shade beside a well all of 30 seconds from their house. Fernando’s precious tractor, patiently maintained and painted by its owner, was sitting near the entrance way attached to a trailer loaded with firewood. The flames are approaching the village rapidly. Fernando and Flor go down to the finca and stand guard. In the end the flames arrive. Fernando and Flor fight and fight, losing a couple of olive trees but saving the tractor and its load. But the fire is now definitively out, here and everywhere. That is the real news.
By chance I return to Spain next day and call in briefly on Fernando. He looks exhausted. He and Flor have been through the mill defending their land. On the night of the evacuation, they thought they were the only villagers involved in private fire-fighting. Next morning they found quite a few others had stayed behind for the same reason. Several houses up on the road through to Portugal are burned out. So are the two wonderful mountain slopes above the village, where he and Flor used to go courting and where he and I have lately walked together.
Nobody in the village knows the ways and byways of this part of the Sierra as well as Fernando does. He worked amongst them day on day when he was in the timber business, and now, semi-retired, he walks or cycles almost every morning. What’s gone is the physical setting of many of his memories – a serious loss for a man who is so local in all his impulses. Flor has a job on a bull-breeding farm- she hates bull-fighting, has never been to a corrida – but at least she has a double focus, the village and the farm 15 kilometres away, beyond the burned-out area. Menos mal, not so bad.
Vara the president, continues to say it’s arson and he will be looking for financial help from the government.
In our own little lives, we have discovered that the river pool in Perales, an old favourite, is in reasonable shape – thoroughly burned out above the pool but the trees on the bank itself and the space under them right by the river is still usable – and used. The pool is one of several on the little river coming down from Acebo, where the fire actually started, we have learned, and it’s dammed in summer to make a chest-deep swimming pool – a ‘piscina natural’, it’s called, a ‘natural swimming pool. Every sierra village has one. Because this is a granite range, there is running water all year round and that’s one of the reasons why the Sierra is so loved by the young in our own family. Two grandchildren came out with me from London and their young voices at the pool help to push the dismay and sense of loss provoked by the great fire into the background. Gaby will be back soon and life will return to normal.
‘