Life in Culebrón

The TV news, the radio or just keeping up with social media will tell you that Spain is on fire. It’s not a new story. By 23 July, more than 120,000 hectares had been turned into charred wasteland. Last year, by the same date, the figure was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares. In other words, this year’s fires have already burned four or five times as much land as they had by this stage in 2025, and that’s despite last year eventually becoming Spain’s worst fire season since 1994. Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger...

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 ...

Spain has lots of wildfires. The number of times they are started by people, both inadvertently and on purpose, is alarming. The farmers who burn stubble, the people who flick fag ends from cars and the people who light barbecues in the countryside are oddly surprised when it all gets out of hand. There are also arsonists who start fires for reasons best known to themselves and their doctors. Fires can also start naturally, a lightning strike being the most common cause. Just like those potholes on British roads, fire breaks all over Spain are suffering from lack of spending. What should be a difficult barrier for the flames to leap, a defensible line for fire fighters to hold, is so full of weeds and shrubs that it offers no real barrier and the fires grow and spread. There have been several fires in the local area over the past week or so. On the national scale they have not been big and they have not spread widely but seeing smoke on the horizon and watching fire fighting helico...

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...