Firefighters managed to protect houses from the fire that has been raging for several days in Tenerife on Sunday, the air quality of this tourist island of the Canaries being now largely affected due to the smoke generated by the blaze.
The fire, which broke out on Tuesday evening in a mountainous region in the northeast of the island, has already devoured 11,600 hectares over a perimeter of 84 km, or about 6% of the island’s area, and forced more 12,000 people to flee according to regional authorities. It has become the largest known to the archipelago located off the west coast of Africa.
Despite forecasts of a difficult night with wind and rising temperatures, things went “much better than expected”, the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, said on Sunday morning.
“It is true that the night started very difficult with many calls saying that the fire was very close to the houses,” he told reporters.
But the firefighters “worked very intensively” and managed not to lose any houses in the blaze, he added, which is “almost a miracle”.
Montserrat Román, head of the archipelago’s civil protection department, confirmed on Sunday morning that “there were no evacuations or confinements” during the night.
On Sunday, however, local authorities had to evacuate the luxury Parador hotel, located in the heart of Teide National Park, without specifying the number of people evacuated.
A total of 610 people fought the blaze on Sunday, and came to the aid of the victims, in addition to the 20 air units which tried to extinguish the fire.
According to emergency services, some 1.5 million liters of water were dropped by air units on the flames on Saturday during 930 sorties.
As the fire spread on the mountainside on Saturday afternoon, towards a town in the north of the island, Candelaria Bencomo Betancor, a farmer in her seventies, watched the scene with anguish.
“The fire is close to our farm, we have trucks, vans, chickens, everything… It’s a good business but if the fire gets to us it will ruin us,” he said. – she told AFP, on the verge of tears.
“They have to do something because the fire is right there,” she added.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is expected on the island on Monday.
So far, the fire has affected 11 municipalities in Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands with 203,400 hectares.
According to the emergency services, the air quality is affected in most of the island “due to the smoke generated by the fire”.
The head of the forest services, Pedro Martinez, spoke on Saturday of an inferno “behaving like a sixth generation forest fire”, in reference to its size. According to him, the efforts of the firefighters are hampered by the immense clouds of smoke and the wind.
Visible on satellite images, a large cloud of smoke eight kilometers high has indeed emerged from the flames. The latter even exceeds the summit of Teide, the highest point in Spain, which overlooks the island with its 3,715 meters of altitude.
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.
Since the start of the current year, Spain has recorded 340 fires which have ravaged nearly 76,000 hectares, according to figures from Effis.
20/08/2023 19:14:34 – La Orotava (Spain) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP