COPY LINK

WILDFIRE

IN IMAGES: How the worst wildfire in 40 years is engulfing Spain’s Tenerife

Tenerife is still struggling to control the "most complex wildfire" the archipelago has seen in four decades, with thousands forced to flee their homes and the island's pristine forests being engulfed by flames.

Published: 18 August 2023 10:31 CEST

IN IMAGES: How the worst wildfire in 40 years is engulfing Spain's Tenerife

A cloud of smoke billows over the village of Candelaria on August 17th 2023, from a huge wildfire which broke out two days earlier and is raging in the northeastern part of the Canary island of Tenerife. (Photo by DESIREE MARTIN / AFP)

It’s been two and half days since a wildfire broke out on the Canary island of Tenerife, just as celebrations for the island’s patron saint La Virgen de Candelaria were underway.

This involves a pilgrimage by thousands of devotees to the coastal town of Candelaria, and it was precisely in the upper part of this municipality and in neighbouring Arafo where the blaze began late on Tuesday night.

Columns of smoke billow out of the forests surrounding the municipality of Güímar. (Photo by DESIREE MARTIN / AFP)

As of Friday August 18th, 3,200 hectares of land have been affected by the flames, mostly a steep, rural area which leads to Tenerife’s Corona Forestal, a natural park made up of densely forested ravines that surround the island’s majestic Teide dormant volcano, Spain’s highest peak.

Noche larga. Me duele muchísimo…😔
Dos cosas. Dada la experiencia, el archipiélago necesita urgentemente un plan e infraestructuras preparadas para tres fenómenos: Volcanes, incendios y lluvias fuertes. O se hace ya, o vamos a lamentarnos siempre que ocurra #IncendioTenerife pic.twitter.com/LBu2BMtXV1

— Juan Cairós (@JuanDKairos) August 18, 2023

On Thursday, the fire spread north towards the municipalities of Santa Úrsula, La Victoria de Acentejo, El Rosario, La Orotava, El Sauzal and Tacoronte, leading authorities to evacuate more than 3,000 people and urge nearly 4,000 others to stay indoors.

LATEST: Thousands forced to flee huge wildfire in Spain’s Tenerife

A group of pets evacuated from their homes along with their owners are received, registered, and cared for by members of different associations in the town of La Orotava. (Photo by DESIREE MARTIN / AFP)

In the island’s capital Santa Cruz and in the second main city of La Laguna, some 20 kilometres away from the blaze, ash and pieces of charred tree bark fell from the air while an orange sun hidden behind a huge cloud of smoke gave the sky an apocalyptic look.

A helicopter flies through the apocalyptic sky over Tenerife as the ‘most complex fire in 40 years’ in the Canaries rages on. (Photo by DESIREE MARTIN / AFP)

Tinerfeños, as people from Tenerife are called, have heard the sound of hydroplanes’ engines rumbling back and forth for the past two days, a contentious subject among locals as there are none of these aircraft on the island and firefighters have had to wait for them to be deployed from mainland Spain, delaying the response to the wildfire.

El primer hidroavión llegado para combatir el fuego del incendio de Tenerife recarga en aguas del Puerto de Santa Cruz pic.twitter.com/AK6As6IPim

— Diario de Avisos (@diariodeavisos) August 16, 2023

Environmentalists have referred to the blaze affecting the Canary Island’s biggest natural park as a “catastrophe”.

Satellite image shows the huge cloud of smoke from the fire in Tenerife reaching neighbouring Gran Canaria. Photo: Nasa

“The Corona Forestal forms a protective ring around the Teide National Park, it has a multitude of ecosystems connected to each other which have great biological wealth,” Jaime Coello told local Tenerife daily El Día.

Two people in El Rosario in northeast Tenerife look at the huge clouds of smoke as the flames approach the village. (Photo by DESIREE MARTIN / AFP)

“It’s vital for water collection and is the habitat of a multitude of species, some endemic to Tenerife or the Canary Islands such as the Canary pine tree, the blue chaffinch or the woodpecker.”

More than 250 firefighters have so far been drafted to tackle the fire, and troops from the Military Emergency Unit (UME) who regularly help efforts to stamp out some of the most dangerous blazes have also been mobilised.

Nasa map showing the area affected by the wildfire on the morning of Friday August 18th.

“This is probably the most complex fire we’ve ever had in the Canary Islands in at least the past 40 years,” Fernando Clavijo, regional head of the archipelago, told reporters.

“The extreme heat and weather conditions… is making the work harder,” he added.

“We are facing a fire the likes of which we’ve never seen before in the Canary Islands,” meteorologist Vicky Palma, pointing to the vast column of smoke from a fire which by Friday morning had been spreading for 54 hours.

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

READ ALSO:

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!