Spain reports the price of the “nightmarish” summer of fire

Jose Antonio Bruneta, a copper producer, stands on a hill where he holds his hives near the small Spanish village of Porto de Sanabria.

He points to the right place, a few hundred meters on the mountain across the way, where lightning struck a few weeks earlier, igniting a wild fire, which had catastrophic consequences.

“This August was a nightmare for me personally, but also for local farmers and everyone here in the village,” he says. “I’m 47 and I’ve never seen a fire that is fierce.”

He eventually burns more than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) land and causes thousands of people to be evacuated from villages in this heavy corner of northwestern Spain, near the Portuguese border.

But it was just one of a few huge flames that devastated Spain this summer, burning 0.8% of the country’s surface.

The most affected areas were here in the northwest, including the regions of Castile Y León and Galicia, plus the western Extremadura region.

The production of copper, which is an important industry in rural northwestern Spain, was one of the main victims of the summer. Bruneta knows people who have lost up to 400 hives in the fires.

Fortunately, its 1,500 hives are intact because the fire stopped just meters from the fields where it protects them. But the damage caused to the nearby flora will have serious consequences for his business.

“I estimate that this year I will lose 50% of copper production, the least because of the fires, and the next year the same or even worse,” says G -n Bruneta. This is because of the time it will take for the flowers that bees should grow again in the surrounding fields.

“There are some types of flower that will not reappear for three years,” he explains.

The lack of structural damage to his hives means that he cannot ask for insurance. He is considering moving many of them elsewhere, hoping to improve the chances of bees to survive and reduce his future losses.

Many farmers have also been forced to move their animals in recent weeks, both for avoiding fires and to ensure that they have access to unburned pastures.

“Things could not be worse for farmers (this summer), it was one fire after another,” says Fernando Garcia, a cow farmer from Kastromil, a village on the border between Castill and Leon and Galicia.

He spoke after spending hours working with local volunteers and firefighters to control another flame on the edge of the village.

G -n Garcia lost about 30 cattle this summer, and most recently had to leave 11 animals that suffered severe burns. Sometimes he even kept his cows closed instead of letting them wander because of fears of fires.

“All this has a great economic impact, but the biggest impact of all is that we cannot sleep at night,” he says. “This is a constant tension.”

Although farmers like Mr Garcia expect to receive insurance payments, he believes there will be expenses.

“They can pay us, but next year, instead of worth it, for example, 5,000 euros ($ 5,858; $ 4.328 pounds), insurance premiums will cost € 10,000 or € 15,000,” he says. “Because insurance companies do not want to lose money.”

The CoAG National Farmers Association was estimated in August, when several major fires were still burned that the industry had suffered damage worth at least 600 million euros.

The largest costs are burned flights and property and death of animals. However, there are other significant damage, such as hives and antennas used by farmers to find their animals.

Farmers are currently locked in negotiations with regional governments about how much public money they need to be paid to help the sector recover.

Another major economic victim of fires this summer is tourism, which represents 13% of Spanish GDP and is a motor of the country’s strong recent growth.

Although most of the tourism -related coastal areas avoid fires this summer, the southern Cadiz province was an exception, as hotels, holiday homes and camping were evacuated for flames.

And the main hot points for wild fire this summer, in the west and northwest, have developed rural tourism in recent years as an alternative to the beach holidays for which Spain was known.

Tourism is popular here, for example, along the Kamino de Santiago path or in the mountain ranges in the area, as well as tourism related to wine and food.

Lake Sanabria, the largest glacial water body on the Iberian Peninsula, is a major local attraction surrounded by a nature park. But the spread of fire, which began in Porto de Sanabria in mid -August, made it close. And many tourists left the area as the smoke filled the air in nearby cities.

“In August, this area was full of tourism and people who have second homes here,” says Miguel Angel Martos, the mayor of Gonant, who is a few minutes away by car from the lake.

“And then on August 18, it dropped to 10% of capacity.”

For tourists, this was uncomfortable. But for many locals, she wrote a financial disaster. Among them was óscar David Garcia Lopez, who has a contract to hire two restaurant bars on the shore of the lake.

He estimates that in the second half of August, when local authorities closed the lake, he lost 80,000 euros because of the hiring of bars, salaries and social security of his 14 employees and the food he bought, but which cannot be sold.

“The regional government said it would pay me 5,500 euros,” he says, laughing bitterly at thought. “They will have to come up with some other type of compensation because I did not want to close, they forced me.”

Hosteltur, a news platform that reports about the tourism industry, has warned that the damage caused by fires in such areas is “not limited to the significant impact but also the impact on the image … of these destinations.”

This summer emphasized the now-the-time-the-time schism between urban and rural Spain. Decades of rural migration, such as those who are most affected by fires this summer, to city centers, means that 90% of the Spanish population now inhabits only 30% of its territory.

The rest became known as La España Vacía or “empty Spain”, where rarely complains of a lack of infrastructure, transport links and schools, as well as the imposition of EU environmental and sanitary provisions on farmers.

The fires, which were particularly illegal this year, only make up this dissatisfaction.

In Castromil, local man Miguel Angel Garcia Diegez summarized the feelings of many people in rural areas who observed the horrors of wild fires this summer.

“It’s difficult enough to survive because of the cost of animal and fuel nutrition – it is more difficult for farmers to pass every day,” he says. “And then it happens from above.”