Spain counts the cost of “nightmare” wildfire summer

José Antonio Bruña, a honey producer, is standing on a hillside where he keeps his beehives near the small Spanish village of Porto de Sanabria.

He points to the exact spot, a few hundred metres away on the mountain opposite, where lightning struck a few weeks earlier, igniting a wildfire that had disastrous consequences.

“This August has been a nightmare for me personally, but also for the local farmers and everyone here in the village,” he says. “I’m 47 and I’ve never seen a fire that fierce.”

It ended up burning more than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of land and causing thousands of people to be evacuated from villages in this farming-heavy corner of north-western Spain, near the Portuguese border.

But it was just one of several vast blazes which have devastated Spain this summer, burning 0.8% of the country’s surface area.

The most heavily affected zones were here in the north-west, including the regions of Castilla y León and Galicia, plus the western region of Extremadura.

Honey production, which is an important industry in rural north-west Spain, was one of the main casualties of the summer. Mr Bruña knows people who have lost up to 400 beehives in the fires.

Fortunately, his own 1,500 hives are intact, because the fire stopped just metres away from the fields where he keeps them. But the damage caused to nearby flora will have serious repercussions for his business.

“I calculate that this year I’m going to lose 50% of my honey production, at the very least, because of the fires, and the following year the same, or even worse,” Mr Bruña says. This is because of the time it will take for the flowers that bees need to grow back again in surrounding fields.

“There are some types of flower that won’t appear again for three years,” he explains.

The lack of structural damage to his hives means he cannot claim insurance. He is considering moving many of them elsewhere, in the hope of improving the bees’ chances of survival and reducing his future losses.

Many livestock farmers have also been forced to move their animals in recent weeks, both to avoid fires and to ensure they can access unburned pasture.

“Things couldn’t have been worse for farmers [this summer], it was one fire after another,” says Fernando García, a cow farmer from Castromil, a village on the border between Castilla y León and Galicia.

He spoke after spending hours working with local volunteers and firefighters to bring under control yet another blaze, on the edge of the village.

Mr García has lost around 30 cattle this summer, most recently having to put down 11 animals which had suffered severe burns. At times, he has even kept his cows enclosed instead of letting them roam, because of fears about the fires.

“All of this has had a big economic impact, but the biggest impact of all is that we can’t sleep at night,” he says. “It’s a constant tension.”

Although farmers like Mr García expect to receive insurance payments, he believes there will be a knock-on cost.

“They may pay us, but next year, instead of costing us, for example, €5,000 [$5,858; £4,328], insurance premiums will cost €10,000 or €15,000,” he says. “Because insurance companies don’t want to lose money.”

The COAG national farmers’ association estimated in August, when several large fires were still burning, that the industry had suffered damages worth at least €600m.

The biggest costs have been burned fields and properties and deaths of animals. However, there are other substantial damages, such as to beehives, and antennae used by farmers to locate their animals.

Farmers’ representatives are currently locked in negotiations with regional governments over how much public money should be paid out to help the sector recover.

The other main economic victim of this summer’s fires has been tourism, which represents 13% of Spanish GDP and has been a motor of the country’s strong recent growth.

Although most of the coastal areas which are associated with tourism avoided fires this summer, the southern province of Cádiz was an exception as hotels, holiday homes and camping sites were evacuated because of blazes.

And this summer’s main wildfire hotspots, in the west and north-west, have developed rural tourism in recent years as an alternative to the beach holidays for which Spain used to be known.

Hiking is popular here, for example along the Camino de Santiago trail or in the area’s mountain ranges, as is wine and food related tourism.

Sanabria Lake, the largest glacial body of water in the Iberian peninsula, is a major local attraction, surrounded by a natural park. But the spread of the fire that began in Porto de Sanabria in mid-August caused it to be shut down. And many tourists left the area, as smoke filled the air in nearby towns.

“In August, this area was at full capacity in terms of tourism and people who have second homes here,” says Miguel Ángel Martos, the mayor of Galende, which is a few minutes’ drive from the lake.

“And then, on 18 August, it dropped down to 10% of capacity.”

For tourists this was inconvenient. But for many locals it spelled financial disaster. Among them was Óscar David García López, who has a contract to hire two bar-restaurants on the shores of the lake.

He estimates that during the second half of August, when the local authorities closed down the lake, he lost €80,000, because of the rental of the bars, the wages and social security payments of his 14 employees, and the food which he had bought but which could not be sold.

“The regional government has said it will pay me €5,500,” he says, laughing bitterly at the thought. “They are going to have to come up with some other kind of compensation because I didn’t want to close, they forced me to.”

The Hosteltur tourism association warned that the damage caused by the wildfires in such areas “is not limited to the material impact, but also the impact on the image… of these destinations”.

This summer has underlined the now-infamous schism between urban and rural Spain. Decades of migration from rural areas, such as those hardest hit by this summer’s fires, to urban hubs means that 90% of the Spanish population now inhabits just 30% of its territory.

The rest has become known as la España vacía, or “empty Spain”, where a sparse population has often complained about a lack of infrastructure, transport links, and schools, as well as the imposition of EU environmental and sanitary regulations for farmers.

The fires, which have been particularly uncontainable this year, only compound that discontent.

In Castromil, local man Miguel Ángel García Diéguez summed up the feelings of many people in rural areas who have watched the wildfires in horror this summer.

“It’s hard enough as it is to survive because of the price of animal feed and fuel – every day it’s more difficult for farmers to get by,” he says. “And then on top that, this happens.”