Madrid (AFP) – Being indoors as much as possible was not the plan when Chicago attorney Thomas Fawkes, 49, arrived on holiday in Madrid with his wife and son. But devastating wildfires ravaging a huge area just 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the north of Spain’s capital gave him little choice.
“We arrived in Madrid three days ago. We took the train in from Barcelona, and we actually got stopped for about an hour and a half due to the wildfires — you could really tell when you were outside that the wildfires were nearby,” Fawkes told AFP.
Retired New Zealand-based couple Pilar and Douglas, spending four months traveling across Europe, explained: “We come to Europe every year; we’ve noticed it getting warmer and warmer, and so the fires are a product of that.”
“I carry a mask,” said Pilar, 69, whose mother was Spanish. “We could see the fire very close to the airport. Very black smoke, and we’re just hoping that this doesn’t continue because it’s really close to Madrid now,” added Pilar, who declined to give her last name.
“I could smell it inside the hotel,” she remarked of the smoke. “We were never worried that the fire would actually get into Madrid itself, but it’s more the effect it has on the air quality,” adds Douglas, 71. The pair were to fly up to Bilbao in the Basque country on Monday, but that brings them within range of wildfires that are ravaging tens of thousands of hectares across the border outside the southwestern French city of Bordeaux. The European Forest Fire Information System puts the extent of Spain’s own damage thus far this summer at almost 130,000 hectares. As Pilar mulls a potential change of plan, her husband says next year they might move their annual trip to the spring or autumn.
“We’re just kind of nervous,” said Letisha Lucas, a 33-year-old Canadian correctional program officer, visiting Madrid with a friend, Lindsay. “It’s kind of shocking, and (we’re) just a little bit anxious about what we are coming into,” Lucas explained after arriving in Spain early Saturday. Coming from Ontario, which has recently suffered large-scale forest fires, she smiled wanly in commenting that she thought she had left such matters behind for at least the length of her holiday, “only to learn that there were fires here.”
“It’s sad just to see how our world is changing,” she concluded. Raquel Cano, owner of Madrid’s Casa Parrondo restaurant, said he feared the fires would deal a blow to tourism. “It smells of burning. It affects tourism; it affects everything – the world is falling apart all around us,” said Cano. “A fire is devastating. People who want to come will come anyway. But it’s not the same seeing the green hills as seeing them completely desolate and black.”
© 2024 AFP
