Firefighters managed to save homes from days-long blazes in Tenerife on Sunday, with air quality on the Canaries’ tourist island now severely affected by smoke from the blazes.
The fire, which broke out Tuesday evening in a mountainous area in the island’s northeast, has already burned 11,600 hectares in a radius of 84 km, or about 6% of the island’s surface, and forced the evacuation of 12,000 people. Regional authorities. It has become the largest known archipelago located on the west coast of Africa.
Despite forecasts of a tough night with winds and rising temperatures, things went “Much better than expected“, Fernando Clavijo, head of the regional government of the Canary Islands, said on Sunday morning.
“Admittedly, the night started off very rough with several calls of fires very close to homes“, he explained to reporters.
But firefighters”Worked very hardHe added that they managed not to lose a single house to the fire.Almost a miracle“.
Montserrat Roman, head of the archipelago’s civil defense department, confirmed Sunday morning that “There are no exits or lockouts“At night.
On Sunday, however, local authorities had to evacuate the luxury Parador Hotel in the heart of the Teide National Park, without specifying the number of evacuees.
A total of 610 people battled the fire on Sunday, apart from 20 air units that tried to douse the flames and came to the aid of the victims.
According to emergency services, about 1.5 million liters of water were dropped on the flames by air units during 930 bursts on Saturday.
“It will destroy us“
Candelaria Bencomo Betancor, a farmer in his seventies, watched the scene in agony as the fire spread across the hillside towards a town in the north of the island on Saturday afternoon.
“The fire is near our farm, we have trucks, vans, chickens, everything… It’s a good business but if we get a fire, it will destroy us.“, he told AFP, on the verge of tears.
“They have to do something because the fire is there“, she added.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is expected to arrive on the island on Monday.
The fires have so far affected 11 municipalities in Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands, covering 203,400 hectares.
According to emergency services, air quality has been affected in most parts of the island.Due to the smoke generated by the fire“.
Pedro Martinez, head of the Forest Service, spoke of an inferno on Saturday “The sixth generation behaves like wildfire“, indicating its size. According to him, firefighters’ efforts were being hampered by huge clouds of smoke and wind.
Visible in satellite images, a huge plume of smoke eight kilometers high actually rose from the flames. The latter is higher than the peak of Teide, the highest point in Spain overlooking the island with a height of 3715 meters.
In 2022, more than 500 fires in Spain destroyed 300,000 hectares, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis). On the front line of facing global warming, nearly 76,000 hectares have already burned by 2023 in this country.
According to statistics from Effis, since the beginning of the current year, 340 fires have destroyed almost 76,000 hectares in Spain.
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