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...

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 ...