There are fires that are counted with figures. Charred hectares, deployed resources, and people evacuated or confined. But there are also those fires that are only understood when you look at them up close. On Wednesday night, on the way to the Ávila town of Burgohondo, ground zero of the entire disaster, the sky was gradually tinging with an intense orange.
At first it was just a simple reflection on the horizon, until it later became an unsettling layer upon which an immense tongue of fire was drawn over the mountain range. A hypnotic, even unreal image, until the moment it was perceived that behind all that there were houses, mountains, and people.
In Burgohondo’s municipal sports center, transformed into a more than improvised shelter, evacuees and volunteers shared a fixed gaze towards the mountain. Not much was said until the silence was broken by a baby’s cry. A lament that was enough to cast upon that landscape the reflection of the fear of an entire town that, as the fire advanced, the only thing it could do was wait with nothing else to do.
Already at dawn, that orange hue of the night still continued. Just seven kilometers later, in Navaluenga, the scene changed. The town, confined due to the danger of being outside, had turned a school into its meeting point. There, neighbors of all ages conversed while watching the hours pass. Among trucks from the Military Emergency Unit (UME) and the silhouettes of those who decided to spend the night inside their cars, laughter and doubts coexisted about when this whole situation would end. The same doubt hovered over every conversation.
The sun rose again and the smoke became noticeable. A thick haze hung over the asphalt and the sky, going directly into the eyes and nose. The fire was no longer visible but it was there. One only had to look at the enormous mountains.
With the news of the confirmation of national emergency level 3, the fire moved to a new level where everyone had to contribute their small grain of sand.
75 kilometers closer to the city of Madrid, transformed into a small and new odyssey between roads cut off by the Civil Guard and constant detours, smoke continued to be the protagonist. Villamanta, the next destination, turned its sports center into a temporary stay for hundreds of people evacuated from Villa del Prado and other municipalities in the southwest of the Community of Madrid. There, tragedy had a face. Elderly people who had left their homes with only the clothes on their backs. Families who had gone almost two days without any information about the state of their homes or when they could return to them. Volunteers with a motto: “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” as stated by Ángel Ramírez, who spent more than 24 hours without sleep to help all the evacuees in Villamanta. And even dozens of dogs barking, unable to understand why they had left their homes behind.
But the heat was suffocating. The constant murmur mixed with the dust raised by the hurried movements of volunteers who wanted to arrive on time at all costs. To know those stories hidden behind each bunk bed, where uncertainty lay.
Marlene had spent the night on the floor of the pavilion. “Yes, we slept here, like this, on the floor,” she recounted resignedly. She had been waiting for hours for news that never seemed to arrive. “They just told us we still can’t go back. Everything depends on the fire. Since it’s very windy, it keeps advancing.” But what really weighed was not just the wait, but the uncertainty. “It’s not knowing, not even having a… nothing.”
When talking about what she had left behind, she didn’t mention furniture or valuables either. She thought of Nieve, her cat who had stayed at home. “We didn’t even put water for him. I went to work thinking I’d be back at night, but we couldn’t return.” As she spoke, she tried to convince herself that he would be fine. It was a concern as simple as it was devastating.
Her story was just one among the hundreds that filled the pavilion. All different, but crossed by the same anguish: that of having left with only the clothes on their backs and not knowing when they would cross the threshold of their home again. “It caught us completely by surprise. We grabbed the medication, the money, the documents, the girl… and we left,” explained Christian, evacuated with his mother, Ildefonsa, and the rest of his family. She can barely walk due to a thrombosis she suffered four years ago. She managed to get out and recover without losing mobility or speech. However, she had to experience this fire which, in her words, was a real challenge that she overcame again with her loved ones.
As the hours passed, an even greater fear arrived. The fires in Ávila and Madrid ran the risk of merging, and everyone blamed and spoke of the same protagonist. That annoying wind that announced that the worst was yet to come and that, on the roads of southwestern Madrid, caused the fire to continue spreading even in places where it was least expected.
New outbreaks emerged next to urbanizations, on the edge of roads, or a few meters from buildings where people peered out to contemplate the catastrophe. Columns of black smoke grew in a matter of minutes while pedestrians and drivers moved aside to make way for emergency vehicles. No one was able to contain the fear produced by being aware that fire is always one step ahead of everything else. Because one only had to bend down and touch the undergrowth to understand why everything that was happening in Spain was happening. Everything seemed to be waiting for the definitive spark for everything to burn. It seemed that the mountain had become the perfect fuel.
The day ended under an unforgettable sky. The orange of the sunset mixed with a gray mantle that covered the horizon. From a distance, the danger could be clearly distinguished. There was a perfectly visible line separating, on one side, life trying to resist and, on the other, a landscape condemned to suffocate.
And it is then that one understands that a fire consumes the tranquility of those who look desperately for their home, the routine of entire towns forced to improvise a shelter, and the certainty that tomorrow everything will remain the same. Because after living with fire, the most difficult thing is not to describe the flames. The most difficult thing is to explain the silence with which thousands of people learned to wait while the mountain burned at full speed.
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