Regional President Clavijo explained the development on Sunday night that numerous emergency calls had been received because of fires that had come very close to houses. But the fire brigade “worked very hard,” said Clavijo. Despite strong winds and high temperatures, not a single house went up in flames. This is “almost a miracle”. Even early on Sunday, the extinguishing work was made more difficult by rising temperatures.
On Saturday evening, Clavijo announced that more than 12,279 people had been evacuated so far. Civil protection chief Montserrat Román said on Sunday that there had been “no more evacuations or closures”.
A few hours earlier, the emergency services had estimated the number of evacuees at around 26,000. However, local authorities later clarified that this figure was based on census data in the affected areas.
It was “a devastating fire, a fire of a (…) magnitude that the Canary Islands have never experienced before,” said the head of the island’s administration in Tenerife, Rosa Dávila. So far, the fire has destroyed an area of 8,400 hectares, which corresponds to a good four percent of the total area of Tenerife.
The fire that broke out in the northeast of the island on Tuesday evening had spread further on Saturday. The national park on the Teide volcano, which is popular with tourists, has been closed. The flames raged in the hills below the volcano near several villages.
The Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands, located off the North African coast in the Atlantic, was recently hit by an extreme heat wave, which caused drought in many regions and increased the risk of forest fires. Fierce fires had only raged on Tenerife’s neighboring island of La Palma in July.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wanted to get an idea of the situation during a visit to Tenerife on Monday. According to the European forest fire information system Effis, in 2022 Spain was the country most affected by forest fires, with almost 500 fires and more than 300,000 hectares of burned area. So far this year there have been 340 fires that have destroyed almost 76,000 hectares of land.
