Canary Islands: some 26,000 evacuations in Tenerife, the fire still ongoing

Strong gusts of wind and higher than expected temperatures facilitated during the night from Friday to Saturday the spread of the fire which broke out Tuesday evening in a mountainous part of the northeast of the island. It is the “most complicated” fire of the last four decades for the Canary archipelago, say the authorities. “Provisional estimates suggest that more than 26,000 people have been evacuated,” the emergency services wrote on the social network X (ex-Twitter) on Saturday evening.

Authorities had reported the previous evening about 4,500 evacuations. But Saturday morning, five new municipalities had been evacuated in the area where the fire is raging. “The fire and the weather have changed and we have had to evacuate five municipalities in the north of Tenerife,” said Manuel Miranda, a local emergency services official, stressing “the danger and the proximity of the fire”.

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 carts, vans, chickens, all that … it’s a good business but if the fire happens, we will be totally ruined”, confides- she, on the verge of tears, at AFPTV. “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.”

Under extreme conditions

The fire has so far affected eleven municipalities on the island of Tenerife, the largest of the Canaries. According to a count on 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.

The island has seen larger fires in terms of area burned, particularly in 2007, but the weather and topography of this one made Mr Clavijo say on Thursday that the archipelago was facing its “most complicated” for 40 years.

The head of the forest services, Pedro Martínez, told reporters on Saturday that the perimeter of the blaze had “almost certainly increased a lot” during the night and that it was “regularly descending” the mountain in the region of Santa Ursula (northeast). .

Pedro Martinez referred to an inferno “behaving like a sixth generation forest fire”, in reference to its size. “The fire exceeds our ability to extinguish it, perhaps not in all sectors, but in a large part of them”, continued Pedro Martinez, adding that the firefighters were put in difficulty 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 site on Saturday and assured that all state resources were mobilized for the island in order to control “this emergency very serious”.

clouds of smoke

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.