“The flames were getting closer and closer, I didn’t know what I was going to find or what to do with the animals,” recounts Carlos Bernad to EL MUNDO, reliving the panic that seized his farm after 11:00 PM last Friday. With the smoke advancing over the stables of the Sierra Oeste and the certainty that they had to flee, his immediate reaction was to grab the phone. “I started making desperate calls to see where I could take them,” he recalls. One of those pleas for help ended up on the other end of the line with his friend Diana Marsá, owner of the Emiralia equestrian center, in the municipality of Villanueva de la Cañada.
Diana, along with her sister Marta, did not hesitate to offer a safe space for Carlos Bernad’s livestock. From that moment on, the entire farm team decided to fully commit, opening the doors of their facilities to anyone who needed it: “We notified all messaging groups, social networks, veterinarians…”, one of the sisters says about the deployment to facilitate transport, supplies, and stables for any horse in danger.
Around midnight, the first alerts began to sound, and shortly after 1 AM, the vans made their entrance into the enclosure. “31 horses from different places have arrived at our facilities. They were very agitated, neighing like crazy,” they recall.
Like them, hundreds of individuals and professionals have made their resources available to the affected families to house the animals from the set of evacuated municipalities since the beginning of the fires, which, like Bernad, are many. For its part, in large capacity enclosures such as the Club de Campo Villa de Madrid, they managed to save nearly 200 animals in the first hours.
Moving a 500-kilo animal surrounded by smoke and in complete darkness entails enormous difficulty. “Horses are a very unique case because they weigh a lot. There’s a lot of nerves, haste, and you have to react quickly. Some get into the trailer well and others get stuck,” explains Carlos Bernad about the complex evacuation he faced in the affected area.
To the agitation of the stables were added the road collapses. The rapid evolution of the flames forced the Guardia Civil to cut off secondary accesses to prioritize the extinction brigades, complicating the journey of transport vehicles. “I was carrying water in the car at night and an agent told me I couldn’t pass under any circumstances. I asked him how I could get it to the animals and he said: ‘You can only go on foot’,” laments one of the people who has traveled to the villages to help evacuate.
Despite the tension, coexistence in the reception pastures has been exemplary. “The advantage is that most are group animals, accustomed to human contact and children. Otherwise, it would be impossible to gather so many animals that don’t know each other in the same enclosure,” they point out.
However, the desperate escape left severe consequences in some cases. In the early hours, a barely three-year-old filly entered the farm in critical condition, with previous physical injuries that worsened with the disaster: a broken hip, multiple wounds, dirty, and with very damaged limbs. At the original farm, devoured by fire, such a serious clinical picture inevitably led to the animal’s sacrifice.
But the evacuation ended up becoming a stroke of luck. The Emiralia team decided to intervene to stop that tragic outcome. “She arrived in a terrible state, with her legs shattered and suffering horribly. We saw her and it was clear to us: ‘She’s staying here because she needs intensive care.’ We couldn’t allow her to be sacrificed,” they recall as they watch her play in a secluded area of the enclosure, conditioned to prevent the other horses from bothering her because she is ailing.
Marta and Diana did not hesitate to adopt her and dedicate themselves to her recovery. As a symbol of this new opportunity, they have temporarily named her Dese, shortening the name she had in her registry, Deseada, and making it more personal.
Thus, a tragedy caused by fire has transformed into a story of survival, with the rescue of Dese as the great beacon of hope among the ashes.
