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.
