Life in Culebrón

I read somewhere that 10% of the Earth's surface is on fire at any one time. I couldn't actually find anything to confirm that on Google but I did find something very scientific looking which said 340 million hectares of the planet burns every year. That's a lot of land. A hectare is 10,000 square metres, the land required as the plot for a new rural build house in Alicante. If you're not a local hoseholder then an International football pitch is usually about three quarters of a hectare.  As I type the fire at Venta del Moro, on the border between Valencia and Cuenca provinces, is just about under control. A fire in Spain is classified as big when it burns more than 500 hectares. Venta del Moro left 1,300 hectares in ashes. A few weeks ago the Sierra de la Culebra in the North east of Zamora province burned 30,000 hectares.  Firefighters classify these forest and grass fires into generations. The sort we've had around here, so far, have been First Generation. This ...

Spain goes on fire a lot. It happens more in summer when fag ends, thrown from moving cars, and seasonal barbecues don't mix with tinder dry pine forests. There are small scale fires all over the place. We've seen fires on the hillside above Cartagena and even on the little mountain behind our house in Culebrón. In summer there are always a series of big fires. Occasionally people, especially firefighters, die and the inhabitants of rural villages are regularly evacuated. There are people who patrol the countryside trying to limit hazhards and provide early warning. Fire services have fire engines with huge ground clearances, to get them into areas without roads, and helicopters and water tanker planes, designed to drop thousands of gallons of water onto inaccessible forests, seem to be readily available. Sometimes the fires happen naturally. Sometimes it's things like a dropped bottles that start fires without people being so directly involved. Sometimes it...