Teacher Sarai Sánchez, 35, has discovered what is essential in life. When Civil Guard agents knocked on the door of her home in Vall d’Uixó (Castellón, 32,242 inhabitants) at two in the morning on Sunday to evacuate her due to the fire that had engulfed 4,300 hectares in one day, she and her partner, Pedro López, 31, knew exactly what they would include among their non-negotiable belongings: a dog and a rabbit. “I am very sentimental. That’s why I had a bad night,” Sánchez sketches with a half-smile on a folding bed in the modular sports center in Moncofa (Castellón, 8,339 inhabitants). The facility’s 700-meter basketball court has been converted at lightning speed into a kind of field hospital to accommodate 240 of the 17,000 displaced by the flames that, since Saturday, are challenging 19 municipalities. “I saw the fire advancing towards my house,” notes a worried López, who is studying to become an emergency health technician.
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For José Carlos Martos —grey cap, trimmed beard, and blue Decathlon t-shirt— the fire also presented a vital dilemma. When, at eight o’clock on Saturday evening, the uniformed officers asked him to leave his house in the Toledo neighborhood of Vall d’Uixó —a district built seven decades ago with the sweat of Manchegan and Andalusian immigration— this calm 51-year-old man stated that either he took his dog Roky with him, or they wouldn’t get him out of the house even with a crane. In the end, he won the standoff with the authorities. “He’s the only thing I have,” he says, staring at the animal. Gripped by haste and the fumes of smoke, the calm man forgot his mobile phone. And now he fears that his house has been engulfed by this allegedly intentional and uncontrolled fire.
On the outskirts of the sports center, 500 meters from the courts transformed into a makeshift shelter, the sun beats down. Luis Segarra, 67, a retiree from the tile company Keraben —one of the engines driving the Castellón economy— has come out for some fresh air. After a night of unrestrained tension and bewilderment, he and his wife, Virginia, 65, are more relaxed. Although they trust that the flames will not consume their single-family home in Alfondeguilla (881 inhabitants), they fear that the catastrophe will transform their idyllic municipality of sculpted mountains into a lunar landscape. “We think the fire has stopped at El Mirador de Castro, which is one kilometer away,” estimates Virginia. “We hope to return soon,” nods his neighbor, Enrique Insua, a 59-year-old Honduran who combines farm work with construction, at a table.
TVE journalist Gemma Guzmán also rushed out yesterday with her husband and two children from Alfondeguilla when, at 8:05 PM, the ringing of bells overlapped with an Es Alert, a mass alert that popped up on her mobile to urge evacuation. That’s how she became aware of the silent threat of the fire. “We grabbed a bag, two changes of clothes, and the children’s toys,” explains Guzman. The town was emptied in half an hour.
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At 56 years old, Francisco Doñate boasts of knowing every inch of the mountains in the La Plana Baixa region. And that’s why, for this ceramic worker passionate about hunting, the sequence of flames brings back bad memories. “The same thing happened in the 80s. A man from Eslida [a town of 815 inhabitants in the heart of the Sierra de Espadán] set fire to the mountain. It took us a long time to recover, and now this…”, laments this resident of Vall d’Uixó, looking down.
The first night in the fire’s sports center —which already operated in 2020 as a makeshift field hospital during COVID— has been calm. “We only had to attend to a girl with autism and give diazepam to people who couldn’t sleep,” notes Moncofa’s Tourism Councilor Illenia Begnozzi.
10 kilometers from the sports facility, at the command post coordinating the crisis, a kind of logistical epicenter where 450 personnel and 20 aerial resources fighting the disaster are distributed, a fear circulates: that the rule of three 30s will be met. A curse that makes any fire inextinguishable, according to a source from the Generalitat. And indeed, when temperatures exceed 30 degrees, winds are stronger than 30 kilometers per hour, and relative humidity is less than 30%, the efforts to quell the catastrophe transform into an odyssey. Sarai, Pedro, José Carlos, Luis, Virginia, and Francisco just want to return to their homes.
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