First, he says a name that she doesn't recognize at first, and then he takes out his mobile and shows her a photograph of a woman. "Oh, yes, I know who it is, I haven't seen her. Is she one of the missing or is she dead?". This conversation is repeated over and over among the neighbors of the municipalities most affected by the Almeria fire, especially in Bédar, where the thirteen fatalities of the fire were from. As the hours pass, however, they begin to discover that the two questions have the same answer: yes, she was one of the missing and she is dead.

Everything has changed in the space of three hours. At noon, Bédar, the municipality most affected by the Almeria fire where the twelve fatal victims lived, was a lifeless town. All the shutters were down, only emergency service vehicles went up and down, there were only four counted neighbors sitting on a bar terrace. Perched on top of a mountain, with the sea in the background, Bédar is a collection of white houses, most of which are spotless after the fire, which has indeed burned and blackened all the surrounding vegetation. Bédar also consists of dozens of scattered houses, some of authentic luxury, most also well-preserved even though the fire surrounded them.

Just by the smell of burning and the intensity and heat of the wind, Andrew knew they had a huge problem. He had been a firefighter all his life in Australia, in Perth, a territory that suffers fires similar to those in the Mediterranean climate. Now he enjoys retirement with his wife, Anna, in a small white house with a small swimming pool and a cozy terrace in Los Gallardos, in the province of Almeria. In fact, Andrew was one of the first people to notice the smell of smoke. He was working in his garden, about 150 meters from the point where the tragic fire started. "That fire had to be stopped, or at least prevented from reaching our houses," he recalls.

On a roundabout on the N-340 road, considered the longest in all of Spain, there is a dilapidated and burnt-out restaurant. It is in the municipality of Los Gallardos, in the province of Almeria. This Saturday, early in the morning, agents from the Civil Guard and the Environment Department of the Junta de Andalucía are analyzing the surroundings of this building, which was already abandoned before the fire hit it. They explain that this is the exact spot where the tragic fire began. And how did it start? They respond that everything points to a spark from electrical wiring, even though the restaurant in question had been closed for years.

"The land will recover. When it rains, when the ash becomes fertilizer. The town will recover. When all the evacuees return home, when we rebuild what has been destroyed. But they will not return. I loved them." Emilia is the pharmacist of Bédar, the town most affected by the Almería fires, the municipality from which dozens of people fled the fire and twelve of them could not escape. She knew them, all of them. Especially a "wonderful" couple, Ana and Pedro, whom she considered "family". "They had the worst of luck," she recounts, still emotional.

Everything is dark except for the sky, which is an orange color leaning towards red. But the sun is neither rising nor setting. It's a quarter past four in the morning, and we are on the road leading to Lubrín, the Andalusian municipality towards which the tragic forest fire in Almeria, which has already left 12 dead and 23 people unaccounted for. Intense tongues of fire burn ever closer. The smoke has forced the evacuation of a town that is awake, judging by the lit windows peeking out. Animals, cats, rabbits, wild boars, and birds are visible and moving disoriented. Blue lights are glimpsed in the distance, but the uneasy calm prevails.

"Many English, Germans and other neighbours were surprised by the fire while fleeing. They saw the flames and wanted to escape. Some took alternative roads... Entire families have died carbonized inside the car", explains Julia with a choked voice. She is one of the people evacuated from Bédar, one of the municipalities most affected by the fire that has been burning since this Friday in Los Gallardos, Almeria.The fire, which has left at least 12 people dead and 23 missing, surprised some neighbors as they fled the flames, according to this neighbor's account to Efe. She explains that many of the affected homes are isolated in the mountains, where numerous foreigners reside. In her case, the smell of burning wood was the first alarm signal: "I was talking to my neighbor and suddenly we saw a very large curtain of smoke behind her house".

It is always appreciated when a film doesn't lecture you. This applies to any film, of course, but it is especially relevant when dealing with works that touch on social issues. Iván & Hadoum, in this sense, gets into many tricky situations right from its premise: Iván is a young trans man who falls in love with a colleague from Morocco at the fruit and vegetable greenhouse where they both work in Almeria. That is to say, the film touches on gender, sexual identity, class, and race. But none of these is the narrative axis. In any case, class ends up having more weight, because the friction between the two characters ends up being work-related (Iván has a complacent attitude towards the bosses; Hadoum is combative). Be that as it may, the opera prima as a director by Ian de la Rosa is not about that either: it's about the moment when two people, regardless of their identity, converge until they diverge, like any other pair of human beings in the first stages of falling in love.

Two people have died and four others have been seriously injured —including two minors— in a shooting in the municipality of El Ejido (Almería) on Monday night. The alleged perpetrator of the shots, a 25-year-old man, is the son of the deceased victims and the father of one of the injured children.

It is a dry, arid land, dotted with scrubland, cacti, and white rockrose. And suddenly, from the barren landscape emerges an immense white expanse almost 30 kilometers long, guarded by the Gádor mountain range and the Mediterranean Sea. This is Almería's sea of ​​plastic, the great vegetable garden of Europe, where nearly 100,000 workers labor, most of them immigrants, and about 30% of them undocumented. In total, there are some 35,000 hectares of greenhouses—the equivalent of 50,000 football fields combined—that can produce up to 3.5 million tons of vegetables and fruits: peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini... Tens of thousands of greenhouses engulf everything, penetrating the towns and cities of the region, white plastic sheets visible from space, blending in with houses and industrial buildings. It is the economic engine of the region: on one side the western area, surrounding El Ejido; on the other valley, the vast esplanade at the foot of the municipality of Níjar.

"Hamsa, I don't see you at school." Joaqui Salord stops a young Moroccan man walking in flip-flops despite the harsh winter weather near Barranco del Búho, a filthy pit of garbage and plastic. The scene repeats itself a few minutes later, as the veteran Jesuit walks among the shacks of Don Domingo de Arriba, in Atochares, a settlement where nearly 600 people live. Kofi cleans his mud-caked clothes while listening to the radio in the background. The stains aren't even concealed by the Ghanaian veteran's meticulous brushing. The same question is posed, and Kofi, battered by poverty and emaciated from two years living among ruins, excuses himself by saying he missed the small open-air classroom the Jesuits run to teach Spanish to immigrants. Atochares is the largest settlement in the province of Almería. The lack of housing for those working in the greenhouses of the "sea of ​​plastic" has led to a proliferation of these substandard dwellings. In the Níjar Valley alone, in the Levante region of the vast "Orchard of Europe," there are almost fifty.

The mayor of Badalona, ​​​​Xavier García Albiol, He requested authorization on Friday to evict the homeless people who live in squalor under the C-31 bridge. He says that no former residents of Institut B9 remain—where he carried out a controversial eviction that literally left dozens of vulnerable people out in the cold during a severe cold snap—because they have all now been rehoused. Many of those people, like those now seeking to be displaced again without any consideration, are undocumented immigrants who, in many cases, work precariously and have great difficulty finding a place to live. Either because they cannot afford it or because they simply do not want to rent. It is the vicious cycle for undocumented immigrants, and for many who are documented, who, despite having jobs, cannot find a way to access decent housing. Hence the settlements that are proliferating everywhere and that are returning to the Catalan, and Spanish, landscape the image of large camps of shacks without the most basic services.

A 5.5 magnitude earthquake struck southern Spain on Monday morning. According to the National Geographic Institute (IGN), it occurred at 7:13 a.m. off the coast of Almería between Cape Palos and Cape Gata, approximately 32 kilometers offshore, taking the municipality of Níjar as a reference point.