Life in Culebrón

We’ve been watching Spain burn for the past couple of weeks. It must be absolutely terrifying to be close to such huge areas on fire. You only need to think about the heat from a puny municipal bonfire to imagine watching the equivalent of a thousand or two thousand, or however many, of those bonfires race through the treeline towards your town, your village, your farm, your house or your family and animals. My good fortune has been only to see it on TV. Something I noticed, among the reports centring on the firefighters, the Guardia Civil or the crews of the water planes and helicopters, was that there were the occasional references to Civil Protection. Not as heroes on the ground nor as any sort of active participant but nonetheless there, lurking in the background. For instance, when the rail service between Madrid and Galicia was about to be restarted the news channels mentioned that ADIF, the people who look after the rail network, were waiting for the say-so of Protección Civil...

It's pretty dry in Spain at the moment. Occasional stories about the state of the reservoirs turn up in the media every now and again and there are forest and scrub fires reported all the time - some of them burn out of control for days. Often the news story says that the fire was provoked by human intervention. This does not always mean that someone set the fires deliberately (though that is amazingly common) but it does include the sparks from the summer barbecue, the fag end tossed, carelessly, out of the car window and the garden waste fire getting out of control. Lots of the fire engines in Spain are designed to deal with forest fires. The bodywork sits on great big wheels and the vehicles are intended for off road as well as on road use. We've seen both aeroplanes and helicopters dropping water on fires. There is a special unit of the military - Unidad Militar de Emergencias - whose job is to intervene in national catastrophes. The hillsides have fire breaks cut into ...