On Saturday, the people of Pa\u00fcls will celebrate the feast of their patron saint, Sant Roc, with a mass, followed by a communal meal eaten at stone tables, jota folk dances and a profound and lingering sense of relief.<\/p>\n
Last month\u2019s wildfire \u2013 which turned the night skies a hellish orange, blackened the surrounding hills and devoured 3,300 hectares<\/a> (8,154 acres) of land \u2013 was a near-disaster that stirred memories of the 2009 blaze<\/a> in nearby Horta de Sant Joan that killed five firefighters.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were afraid that everything would burn and that they\u2019d lose everything,\u201d says Enric Adell, the mayor of the small Catalan mountain town. \u201cThey were scared of getting trapped and not being able to get out of the village.\u201d<\/p>\n The fear of a fire like that, he adds, is unlike any other kind of fear.<\/p>\n Chart showing the increase in the land burned by wildfires in Spain<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been through a pandemic and a nationwide power cut and torrential rains, but a fire on this scale was something else \u2013 as was the aftermath,\u201d says Adell.<\/p>\n In the hills above the village square, the charred trees are a reminder of what could have happened without the bravery of hundreds of firefighters, one of whom, Antonio Serrano<\/a>, lost his life. Changing winds and sheer luck also played a part.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a fire hits,\u201d says the mayor, \u201cit really leaves its mark.\u201d<\/p>\n This summer\u2019s fires<\/a> have already left their mark across the length and breadth of Spain, from Galicia and Castilla y Le\u00f3n in the north-west to Catalonia in the north-east, from the smart suburbs outside Madrid<\/a> to Extremadura in the south-west, and all the way down to the beaches of Tarifa in Andaluc\u00eda.<\/p>\n A man runs away from the flames during a wildfire in the province of Ourense. Photograph: Miguel Riopa\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n As well as panic and the increasingly familiar tang of smoke, this year\u2019s fires have brought with them a sense of deja vu.<\/p>\n The hot, deadly summer of 2022 yielded images that laid bare Spain\u2019s huge vulnerability as the effects of the climate emergency became increasingly plain. Footage that went around the world that July<\/a> showed \u00c1ngel Mart\u00edn, a 53-year-old man from T\u00e1bara in Castilla y Le\u00f3n, using one of his excavators to try to stop the fires in the Sierra de la Culebra reaching the town. In the video, the machine is engulfed by the flames before Mart\u00edn runs out of the inferno, the clothes burning off his frame. Mart\u00edn, a much-loved figure in T\u00e1bara<\/a>, suffered burns to 80% of his body and died in hospital three months later.<\/p>\n Three years on, Spain<\/a> is once again on the defensive.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fires are one of the parts of the impact of that climate change, which is why we have to do all we can when it comes to prevention,\u201d the country\u2019s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, told Cadena Ser radio<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n \u201cOur country is especially vulnerable to climate change. We have resources now but, given that the scientific evidence and the general expectation point to it having an ever greater impact, we need to work to reinforce and professionalise those resources.\u201d<\/p>\n A resident of Pa\u00fcls found his horse after it ran away, scared by the fire. Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty ImagesOn the climate emergency frontline<\/p>\n As politicians engage in blame games, experts warn, once again, that all the bickering over the number of water-dumping planes<\/a> misses the point. The current spate of fires, they add, was entirely predictable and underlines the need for a fundamental rethink of land use and management in a continent that is on the frontline of the climate emergency.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year\u2019s fires are basically on the same level as those we saw in 2022 and 2023,\u201d says Marc Castellnou, the head of forestry for the Catalan regional fire department and a fire analyst at the University of Lleida.<\/p>\n \u201cSince 2017, we\u2019ve seen this change towards more extreme fires \u2026 It\u2019s nothing new \u2013 and it\u2019s happening because climate change is bringing higher temperatures for much longer periods.\u201d<\/p>\n The dynamics are not hard to discern. If you have annual heatwaves that arrive one after the other \u2013 and last longer and longer \u2013 in a country where decades of rural depopulation have left huge areas of land untended, overgrown or given over to homogenous cultivation, then you will have massive fires that are getting harder to fight. As one Spanish scientist noted earlier this week<\/a>: \u201cWe have all the ingredients for the molotov cocktail we\u2019re seeing right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Wildfires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and are spreading because of landscape change as well as climate change. Photograph: Miguel Riopa\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Cristina Montiel, a professor at Madrid\u2019s Complutense University and an expert in forest fires and land use, says that while Spain\u2019s firefighters and other emergency services are doing an \u201cextraordinarily magnificent\u201d job that is keeping far greater disasters at bay, the problem lies with society as a whole.<\/p>\n Despite the annual fires and the abundance of evidence, she says, \u201cit turns out that we are not \u2013 and we do not want to be \u2013 aware of the danger in which we\u2019re living\u201d. If we were even a little aware, she adds, \u201cwe would take the measures and decisions to protect ourselves\u201d. Fifty years ago, says Montiel, most forest fires were intentional. But today\u2019s forest fires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and are spreading so voraciously because of two factors: landscape change and climate change.<\/p>\n It is an explosive combination. This year\u2019s heavy spring rains led to an increase in plant growth that has now been dried out by successive heatwaves, leaving all that combustible vegetation, much of it in neglected areas, ready to serve as fuel for the fires. The situation is further complicated by the phenomenon of \u201cflash droughts\u201d<\/a>, which can quickly dry out even well-irrigated agricultural land, and which are likely to become more common as global heating continues.<\/p>\n Pa\u00fcls is a case in point. Its population has dwindled over the decades and fewer and fewer people in the area work the land because of the shrinking economic rewards.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there were 100 people working the land before, now there are 30,\u201d says Adell. \u201cIf the same policies continue and things remain as hard as they are, then in a few years, there\u2019ll be almost no one.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to This is Europe<\/p>\n The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans \u2013 from identity to economics to the environment<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n A vehicle burned by the Pa\u00fcls fire in Aldover. Photograph: Europa Press News\/Getty Images<\/p>\n All those years of abandonment had left ravines, gullies and pine forests overgrown and made them into temperature-activated timebombs. Last month\u2019s fire, says the mayor, was simply uncontrollable: \u201cWe saw that there was no way of stopping it.\u201d<\/p>\n If there is much truth in the idea that preparation is all \u2013 and in the old maxim that \u201cfires are put out in winter\u201d \u2013 the challenge now lies in undoing decades of neglect and bad planning that have seen the landscape forgotten and the appearance of housing developments in hazardous places.<\/p>\n But Montiel cautions that the much-needed rethink will be neither quick nor easy.<\/p>\n \u201cIf things took a turn for the worse 50 years ago, we can now start changing them for the better,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you can\u2019t think that starting to change things now will pay off within two summers because that isn\u2019t true. These things are processes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Fire Flocks\u2019 of sheep and goats<\/p>\n There are, however, already some signs that the message is getting through. After the Horta de Sant Joan fire 16 years ago, a group of shepherds approached the Catalan fire department to ask what they could do to prevent more blazes.<\/p>\n