The flames that blackened the earth, scorched the tree trunks, sooted the dry stone walls, devoured the old Citroën Dyane and left a lingering tang of smoke on the summer breeze spared the bowl of cherries that sits, untouched, on the kitchen table of a burned-out house.
Their survival is not the only miracle witnessed recently in Torre Val de San Pedro. Last Friday, this small village in the north-western Spanish region of Castilla y León was surrounded by blazes as one of the dozens of wildfires that have devoured tens of thousands of hectares of land over the past week tore over the hills from neighbouring Navafría.
