The smoke-grey skies over Tábara were turning furnace orange as Ángel Martín forced down the ham sandwich that had been pressed on him by his friends at the petrol station and ran to his excavator.
By mid-afternoon on Monday 18 July last year, the 53-year-old builder’s yard owner had been watching the wildfires in the Sierra de la Culebra in north-west Spain creep closer to his town for eight hours, waiting to see whether his trucks and diggers could help fight the blaze.
A little before 3pm, the flames arrived on the edge of Tábara and Martín made the quick, selfless decision that would lead to his death three months later.
His actions, captured on a video that went around the world, would yield some of the starkest and most disturbing images of the scorching and deadly European summer of 2022, the hottest on record.
Minutes after climbing into his excavator to try to dig a firebreak to halt the blaze, Martín and his vehicle were swallowed by the flames and the drifts of thick, black smoke.
A few agonising seconds later, the video showed him somehow managing to stumble and run out of the inferno, his clothes consumed by the flames. He had suffered burns to 80% of his body.
Rescuers bundled Martín into a car and drove him to a nearby health centre, from where he was taken by helicopter to a hospital in the city of Valladolid. Despite the best efforts of medical staff, however, the man hailed in the press as el héroe de Tábara died from his injuries in the early hours of 25 October 2022.
Almost a year after the fires hit – and following its driest April to date – a drought-struck Spain is bracing for another summer of wildfires and heat-related deaths as the realities of the climate emergency become increasingly inescapable across the Iberian peninsula and beyond.
Temperatures this week are forecast to reach 44C (111F) in parts of the country as the second heatwave of the summer bites. In Tábara, the memories of last July are raw and the trees around the town still charred black.
“It all happened in just 15 minutes,” says Montse Fernández Blanco, who was working at the petrol station that day.
“The whole town was in pieces. Everyone loved Ángel. He was such a lovely person and he was always ready to help anyone with whatever they needed. We all hoped he’d make it; you never lose hope. But he didn’t make it.”
As Tábara’s mayor, António Juárez, puts it, “what nobody wanted to happen happened. We all know each other in this town and Ángel was a guy who was always ready to help other people and pitch in. What he did to try to save the town is proof of all that.”
Juárez, a forestry engineer and volunteer firefighter, says the causes of the wildfires are not hard to fathom. He refers to Tábara and the surrounding areas as “the ground zero” of what has come to be known as la España vaciada – the hollowed-out Spain.
A few decades ago, there were almost 2,000 people in Tábara; today it has just 770 inhabitants, most of them older people. The draw of the big cities has led to depopulation, which, in turn, has led to profound changes in the surrounding landscape.
“What we’re seeing more and more is the loss of the ties that bind people to the land,” says the mayor. “New sources of energy, together with depopulation, mean that people scarcely use the forests: there’s no longer a firewood season or people making charcoal. That means the forests are becoming exponentially overgrown.
“In places where there were once a few oak trees, there are now oak forests. Places where there were once pastures are now scrublands. There’s less livestock and there are now no goats here that used to live off the land.”
All of which means that there is far more vegetation to burn. Add to all that an extremely dry year, strong winds and a lack of fire-fighting equipment, “and you get what we endured last year. It was, in the widest sense of the phrase, a perfect storm”.
Juárez’s summary tallies with the findings of a new report from Greenpeace that warns the effects of the climate emergency in Spain will be as far-reaching as they will be devastating.
“Projections indicate that if Spain does not cut severely the emissions that cause global warming, the country will become hotter, drier, more arid and flammable,” says Maria José Caballero of Greenpeace Spain. “It will experience more floods and high-intensity fires and the impacts of sea level rise.”
According to EU figures, the 2022 wildfire season was the second worst on record, with blazes devouring 1,624,381 hectares – an area of land roughly equivalent to Montenegro. In Spain alone, wildfires burned through 315,705 hectares.
Jofre Carnicer, a professor of ecology at the University of Barcelona and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the wildfires already seen in Spain, Australia and Canada are a taste of things to come.
“We’ll need to increase our capacity when it comes to prevention but we’re also going to find that there are limits when it comes to adaptation,” he says. “We’re already seeing some kinds of fires whose virulence and simultaneous natures require tools that human society doesn’t always have.”
While investing in rural areas and forest management is key, Carnicer says the best way to mitigate the effects of the climate emergency is by reducing emissions.
“The scientific consensus is that the best stabilisation strategy is a drastic reduction in emissions in the next 10-20 years,” he said. “That won’t be easy, but the more we do, the braver and the more drastic the action we take, and the better the public and private financing is, the better the scenario will be.”
Spain’s environment minister, Teresa Ribera – who has already pointed out that “all the money in the world” won’t fix the damage done by a failure to reduce emissions – also believes that last year’s events in the Sierra de la Culebra will become more and more common.
“In places where the climate is in transition – such as the Iberian peninsula – big fires are probably one of the most real, frequent, important, damaging and painful threats that climate change brings,” she says.
Although Spain’s 17 regional governments are responsible for responding to wildfires in their own territories, the central government has 60 aircraft, 200 specialist firefighters and a military emergencies unit that can be deployed to supplement their efforts.
As well as working to improve preparation, enhance civil protection measures and professionalising and increasing human resources, Spain has also deployed some of those specialist firefighters to help tackle recent blazes in Chile and Canada.
“We don’t just need to cooperate when it comes to sharing experience with other neighbouring countries – it’s also important that we strengthen our rapid response capacity for when it’s needed in different countries that we might not immediately think of as those most affected by these risks but which, as time goes by and the accumulated effects of climate change pile up, will also find themselves vulnerable to this kind of phenomenon,” says the minister.
In Tábara, where the sky is now blue and the summer air hot and dusty, the mayor says the best way to avoid a repeat of last year’s tragedy would be to reintroduce livestock grazing to keep the land clear. More fire-fighting equipment, water points, lookouts and planning would also help.
“The authorities haven’t known how to adapt to these circumstances,” says Júarez. “They haven’t tackled the demographic problems and they haven’t known how to manage the forests. And they haven’t been able to foresee just how virulent these fires can be or provide the necessary means of fighting them.”
The people of Tábara, he adds, are still grieving. “They don’t know what to do or what to say. This wasn’t a dream you can wake up from. It was reality and there’s now a sadness here in people’s everyday lives.”
Back at the petrol station, Montse Fernández Blanco sells cold cans to her thirsty customers and thinks, as she often does, about her friend Ángel.
“We still talk about him a lot,” she says. “And I remember his jokes and what a good, happy person he was. The thing is he would have done it again because that’s what he was like.”
