Spain has the cost of summer in the “Nightmare” forest

José Antonio Bruña, a producer of honey, stands on a hill where he keeps his hives near the small Spanish village of Porto de Sanabria.

It shows the exact place, a few hundred meters away on the mountain opposite, where lightning hit a few weeks earlier, triggering a forest fire which had disastrous consequences.

“This August was a nightmare for me personally, but also for local farmers and everyone here in the village,” he said. “I am 47 years old and I have never seen such a fierce fire.”

He ended up burning more than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of land and causing thousands of people evacuated from villages in this agricultural corner of North West of Spain, near the Portuguese border.

But it was only one of the many flames that devastated Spain this summer, burning 0.8% of the country’s surface.

The most affected areas were here in the northwest, including the regions of Castilla y León and Galicice, as well as the western region of the end.

Honey production, which is an important industry in northwest Spain, was one of the main victims of summer. Mr. Bruña knows people who have lost up to 400 hives in fires.

Fortunately, his own hives are intact, because the fire stopped a few meters from the fields where he keeps them. But the damage caused to the neighboring flora will have serious repercussions for his business.

“I calculate that this year, I will lose 50% of my production of honey, at the very least, because of the fires, and the following year, or even worse,” explains Mr. Bruña. It is because of the time it will take for flowers whose bees must repel in the surrounding fields.

“There are certain types of flowers that will no longer appear for three years,” he explains.

The lack of structural damage to his hives means that he cannot claim insurance. He plans to move many of them elsewhere, in the hope of improving the chances of survival of bees and reducing his future losses.

Many breeders have also been forced to move their animals in recent weeks, both to avoid fires and to ensure that they can access unruted pastures.

“Things could not have been worse for farmers (this summer), it was a fire after the other,” explains Fernando García, a farmer of Castrromil cows, a village on the border between Castilla y León and Galicia.

He spoke after spending hours working with local volunteers and firefighters to master another fire, at the edge of the village.

Mr. García lost around 30 cattle this summer, more recently, having had to deposit 11 animals which had undergone serious burns. Sometimes he even kept his cows locked up instead of letting them wander, because of the fears of the fires.

“All this has had a big economic impact, but the greatest impact of all is that we cannot sleep at night,” he said. “It’s a constant tension.”

Although farmers like Mr. García expect to receive insurance payments, he thinks there will be a training cost.

“They can pay us, but next year, instead of costing us, for example, € 5,000 ($ 5,858; £ 4,328), insurance premiums will cost € 10,000 or € 15,000,” he said. “Because insurance companies do not want to lose money.”

The national farmers ‘association’ association estimated in August, when several large fires burned, that the industry had suffered damages worth at least 600 million euros.

The most important costs were fields and burnt properties and the death of animals. However, there are other substantial damage, such as hives, and antennas used by farmers to locate their animals.

Farmers’ representatives are currently locked in negotiations with regional governments on the amount of public money should be paid to help the sector to recover.

The other main economic victim of this summer fires was tourism, which represents 13% of Spanish GDP and was an engine of the country’s recent growing growth.

Although most coastal areas associated with tourism have avoided fires this summer, the southern province of Cadiz was an exception because hotels, holiday homes and camping sites were evacuated due to flames.

And the main hotspots of forest fires this summer, in the West and northwest, have developed rural tourism in recent years as an alternative to the beach holidays for which Spain was known.

The hike is popular here, for example along the Camino de Santiago trail or in the mountain ranges of the region, as well as tourism linked to wine and food.

Lake Sanabria, the largest ice lake in the Iberian Peninsula, is a major local attraction, surrounded by a natural park. But the spread of the fire that started Porto de Sanabria in mid-August caused the closure. And many tourists have left the region, while smoke filled the air in neighboring cities.

“In August, this area was in full capacity in terms of tourism and people who have second homes here,” said Miguel ángel Martos, the mayor of Galende, a few minutes by car from the lake.

“And then, on August 18, he dropped to 10% of the capacity.”

For tourists, it was not practical. But for many residents, he has spent a financial disaster. Among them, óscar David García López, who has a contract to hire two bar restaurants on the shores of the lake.

He estimates that during the second half of August, when local authorities closed the lake, he lost € 80,000, due to the rental of bars, wages and social security payments of his 14 employees and the food he had bought but which could not be sold.

“The regional government said that it would pay me € 5,500,” he said, bitterly laughing at this thought. “They will have to find another kind of compensation because I did not want to close, they forced me.”

The Tourism Association at Hozteltur has warned that the damage caused by forest fires in such areas “are not limited to the material impact, but also to the impact on the image … of these destinations”.

This summer underlined the now infamous schism between urban and rural Spain. Decades of migration of rural areas, such as those mostly affected by this summer fires, towards urban centers, means that 90% of the Spanish population now only enters 30% of its territory.

The rest has become known as the España Vacía, or “empty Spain”, where a sparse population has often complained about a lack of infrastructure, transport links and schools, as well as the tax and health regulations of the EU for farmers.

The fires, which have been particularly indisputable this year, only make up this dissatisfaction.

In Castrromil, the local man Miguel ángel García Diéguez summed up the feelings of many people in rural areas that saw the horror forest fires this summer.

“It is quite difficult because it is a question of surviving because of the price of animal food and fuel – every day, it is more difficult for farmers to get out of it,” he said. “And then it happens.”