The field will recover, but they will not return. I loved them

The Gallardos / Mojácar / Garrucha (Almeria)"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.

Bédar is an urban center with fewer than 1,000 registered inhabitants, anchored in the middle of a mountain range and surrounded by scattered houses, many of them occupied by retired foreign couples, mainly English and Belgian. Ana and Pedro, who were under seventy, previously lived in Mojácar, a coastal town less than a 30-minute drive from Bédar. "They came here and always said they had found paradise in Bédar, that they were very happy, more than ever," Emilia laments. He was cultured, "we talked about everything," they were part of the community. Emilia does not want to remember how they died trying to escape a fire that ascended at full speed up the hills and conquered the paths.

Emilia also doesn't want to remember how another neighbor, whom she often saw at the pharmacy, got trapped in his car and called his wife, surrounded by flames, "saying he was going to die". Nor does she want to talk much about two other known married couples who also couldn't escape. "We are devastated," she laments. She is one of the few people who have been able to return to Bédar to collect medication. On Friday, the day after the hardest part of the fire, she saw a "ghost town". Fortunately, most of the houses in the town center were in good condition. This Friday she has already seen more neighbors and has recovered "part of her hope".

"There was more and more fire"

It was a recurring Thursday afternoon. Pablo was eating sardines, Maria, who lives in Barcelona, but is originally from Bédar and still goes there in the summer, was at home with her granddaughters. It was one of them, only eight years old, who first saw the fire, because she was doing her homework in the upstairs apartment. She raised her head through the window and commented, "thinking it was normal," that there was smoke and flames in the distance. "There was more and more fire," she recalls. She called a relative who works at the City Council and told him: "Haven't you heard the bells? You have to leave." The bells of the Bédar bell tower rang out, warning of the emergency, but Maria criticizes that she didn't know how to interpret them: "What the hell do I know there's a fire because the bells are ringing? Maybe someone has died, maybe there's a mass," she explains. Both she and her friends criticize that no alert was sent to mobile phones. "I was expecting an ES-Alert," insists another Maria, a friend of the first one.

They say this from a four-star hotel, the Best Mojácar, on the seafront, with a swimming pool and about to enter a buffet. The Bédar City Council has facilitated the stay at the hotel for the evacuees who had nowhere to go. There are about eighty evacuated people in this hotel and they will still sleep here this Saturday. Maria's granddaughters feel like they are on a fun vacation. The fire remains active, helicopters come and go, and there are dozens of displaced people. A few kilometers away, by the coast, everything continues with the strict normality of a Mediterranean summer. Maria still remembers the suffering.

A relative recommended that they go to a meeting point, where they would be evacuated by coaches. They went there on foot, but the buses were empty: they could not follow the planned route because the fire prevented it. And they were there, with her husband and her two minor granddaughters, with a fire becoming more visible, "with the fire running everywhere". They returned, also on foot, to their home, where they took the car and went to Lubrín, west of their town, the saving destination for many of the evacuees from Bédar.

"There was time to evacuate"

But not all evacuations were the same. Diego and Pedro, both residents of Bédar, were knocked on their home door. It was the Civil Guard. They were told they had to leave immediately. "There was time to evacuate," says Pedro, who is worried because he still hasn't been able to return home and doesn't know how it is. In fact, he is parked at a roundabout in Los Gallardos, the town from which one climbs to the mountain range and, therefore, accesses Bédar. Several Civil Guard patrols are blocking access to the town and he hopes they will let him pass. In some cases, they have been allowed to go up to get medicine or essential items. The first conversation takes place at twelve noon and at seven in the evening he is still there, always closely watched by his dog.

The agents explain that there are still many secondary fires, so it is not safe to continue. One of the police officers has just seen an aerial image of the fire and comments that the center of Bédar is fine, but that most of the scattered houses have been destroyed. The fire has already consumed almost 7,000 hectares and has left 23 people unaccounted for. For now, there are seven missing person reports. The agents comment that as lifeless bodies are identified, people will be removed from the list of the missing. In cases of foreign nationals, DNA checks always take longer. After a complicated night, this Saturday has been an window of opportunity for the extinction crews, who have not had the wind against them and have been able to attack the fire. Until now, they had barely been able to contain it.

The long wait

This roundabout in Los Gallardos has become a sad traffic jam of people who cannot return home. From Bédar, burnt cars are leaving, towed by cranes, but no one can go the other way. Kamran and Anna say they cannot lower their car window and point to a small kitten peeking out from between their legs. There are four more inside the car. There are the daughters, the mother, and the grandmothers. Visibly emotional, Kamran, originally from Iran, explains that he has been in the car for a day and a half waiting to be able to access his home in Bédar. He worries about the cats' health. Anna, originally from the United Kingdom, laments that there are five more cats at home and they don't know how they are, whether they have managed to avoid the fire or not.

While the fire continues to burn, beds are beginning to be folded at the municipal sports center in Garrucha, also on the coast of Almeria, driven by local volunteers. 470 evacuees have slept there in two nights. Practically all have found alternatives, but they cannot return home to know if it still exists.