The vast fire on the Spanish tourist island of Tenerife has been raging since Tuesday evening, the emergency services announced on Saturday. “Provisional estimates suggest that more than 26,000 people have been evacuated”, wrote the emergency services on the social network X (ex-Twitter).

The blaze, which broke out in a mountainous part of the northeast of the island, spread overnight from Friday to Saturday due to particularly difficult weather conditions, with strong winds and higher temperatures than ‘expected. It is “the most complex” of the last four decades for the Canary archipelago, according to authorities.

Authorities had reported Friday evening about 4,500 people evacuated since the start of the fire. But Saturday morning, five new municipalities had been evacuated in the area.

Forest Service Chief Pedro Martínez said midday on Saturday that the fire’s perimeter had “almost certainly grown a lot” overnight and was “steadily descending” down the mountain in the Santa Ursula area. (Northeast).

In the northern town of La Matanza de Acentejo, Candelaria Bencomo Betancor, a farmer in her 70s, gazes with anguish at the smoke coming from the mountains. “The fire is close to our farm, we have wagons, vans, chickens, all that…. It’s a good business, but if the fire happens, we will be totally ruined”, he confides. – she, on the verge of tears. “They have to do something because the fire is right there.”

Another resident, Maria del Pilar Rodriguez Padron, is sleeping in her car near her house. “They offered us a place to go but we prefer to stay in the car to watch the house and see if it is burning or not. Being somewhere else, we just couldn’t sleep.”

The fire has so far affected eleven municipalities on the island of Tenerife, the largest of the Canaries. According to a count from Friday evening, it had devoured 5,000 hectares, or nearly 2.5% of the area of ??Tenerife which covers a total of 203,400 hectares. “Last night’s weather conditions were frankly extreme,” the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, told reporters on Saturday.

Forest Service Chief Pedro Martínez said on Saturday that the perimeter of the blaze had “almost certainly increased a lot” overnight and was “steadily descending” the mountain in the Santa Ursula region (northeast). He referred to an inferno “behaving like a sixth generation forest fire”, in reference to its size.

“The fire is beyond our ability to put it out, maybe not in all areas, but in a large part of them,” he continued, adding that firefighters were struggling on the ground. by the wind and heavy clouds of smoke.

Before Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is expected in Tenerife on Monday, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska came to the scene on Saturday and assured that all state resources were mobilized for the island in order to control “this emergency. very serious “.

The island of Tenerife is the largest of the seven that make up the Spanish Canary archipelago, located off the west coast of Africa.

The fire generated a large cloud of smoke eight kilometers high, visible on satellite images, which exceeded the summit of Teide, a volcano overlooking the island and the highest point in Spain with its 3,715 meters above sea level. .

This fire occurs between two heat waves on the island which has many dry areas, which increases the risk of fires.

Experts say extreme weather events have intensified due to global warming. Heat waves are therefore likely to be more frequent and intense, and their impact more widespread.

In 2022, 300,000 hectares were destroyed by more than 500 fires in Spain, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis). Nearly 76,000 hectares have already burned in 2023 in this country, on the front line in the face of global warming.