“The fire is devouring you”: like several residents evacuated from the village of Aldea del Fresno, Ecologio Cabrera remains in shock at the flames raging in this area of the west of the Madrid region.
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This 86-year-old retiree continues: “If you don’t run away from him and try to face him, he will devour you”, before mentioning “the danger of fumes” for breathing.
AFP
In 29 years of living in Aldea del Fresno, about fifty kilometers from the center of the capital, “I have never experienced anything like this,” he assures, as if to better underline the scale of this unprecedented event.
According to regional authorities, 6,000 hectares have already gone up in smoke since Thursday.
AFP
Met by AFP, Ecologio Cabrera recounts how the firefighters rushed him out of his home: “They arrived, they ordered everyone to get out”, “without having time to take anything”.
The octogenarian also said he was very “scared” for his daughter, a resident of a neighboring town, “where everything burned”.
AFP
He describes a race against time to prevent the threatening flames from reaching the house of his daughter, who waited for the firefighters to arrive by spraying water, “with garden hoses”, around her house and around with her family.
Stunned
Mercedes García, a 69-year-old housewife, was also among those evacuated.
It was early Thursday evening that the police and the Civil Guard extricated this lady from her home, who had difficulty moving around with a walker.
AFP
In the municipal gymnasium where she was welcomed, she spent the night sleeping on an inflatable pool mattress, while her husband dozed off on a chair.
“What happened here is incredible,” she said, still stunned by the events.
“The entire village was evacuated”, i.e. “around 3,500 inhabitants”, explains Félix Hernández, a municipal councilor, not far away.
“I am 53 years old and I have seen major fires, but also big ones, no,” he says, expressing his “fear” in the face of events that seem to overwhelm him.
“Everything is black”
A few kilometers away, the village of Villa del Prado (nearly 8,000 inhabitants) has not been evacuated, but is confined, anxiously awaiting the improvement of the situation, which worsened at midday with the merger of the two fires in the area.
“Tears are flowing, but not only for me, for everyone,” laments Mariano González, a 67-year-old retiree, contacted by AFP by telephone, describing the landscape of “desolation” around him.
When he woke up, “it was as if there had been a foggy day,” he says, after walking his dog: “It’s very difficult to describe,” “everyone had masks.”
“Everything I see, I look up, I look down, behind, in front, and everything is black…” he said again.
And he continued, his voice trembling: “I have a field of hundred-year-old olive trees opposite: it burned, the trunks collapsed. I have century-old pine trees across the street (…) they are all charred. It’s heartbreaking…”
