Tuesday 28 July 2009

El Tiétar on fire. (In Memoriam of Nature)

These fruit trees, the flowers, the wineyards, the fig trees and the colours won't be the same for a long time. It takes 30 years for Nature to recover from a big fire. And this is what El Tiétar is suffering today. Arenas de San Pedro, Monbeltrán, el Arenal those beautiful small villages have been on fire since midday.
Not a storm, not any natural cause. Human irresponsibility. This ill fascination some people feel towards fire is causing great suffering in the country. Besides the economical loss, there is beauty loss and much worse, personal loss. A teacher from Arenas has died in the fire and there is a disappeared woman.

Ancient constructions also in danger, as the castle in Mombeltrán, have witnessed all kind of disasters. But will they understand this madness? I'm afraid not.

3 comments:

ivasil said...

I can't say how sorry I am. I kept hearing about fires in Spain in the news this summer and I always tried to catch the place, as I knew you had had such problems before.
But why do people do that? Any reason, like getting rid of unwanted vegetation or just for fun? If so, it's quite sick. I hope they get caught and punished.

caluad said...

I can't understand it either. There are a couple of ideas about the beginning of the fire. One of them is personal revenge against somebody in the Valley, and this one is the most understandable reason because the other one is complete madness.
It could have been started by small groups of workers hired by the region government to clean the forests. They could have started the fire in order to keep their work longer. It's a stupid decision, now, they don't have anything to clean because experts are needed.
When governments don't invest on nature and get the proper paid experts, and not temporary workers who know very little or nothing about nature, these incidents are likely to happen.
It's very late to find the guilty ones and very difficult to find the real "actors" of it, but a lesson should be learnt.
Trees, animals, beauty, fruit, the economical foundation of the life in the valley have been destroyed. and the last but not the less important: human lives.
In the end, after the newspapers photos only the inhabitants will be there to suffer the burnt smell, the ash landscape, the loneliness.

ivasil said...

I'm sorry.
It's a shame that we call ourselves the only rational species on the Earth.
I think the authors should be found and things should be done so that it does not happen again. Not taking measures would be like contributing to such a crime.