In search of a new strategy to ensure the future of the Culebra Mountains

This article is part of a series of three articles from El Diario’s larger multimedia project on mega-fires in Europe by Mariangela Paone, Raúl Rejón, Sofía Pérez and Raúl Sánchez. Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III

Sierra de la Culebra (Zamora)

When you reach the top of Peña Mira, you step on the summit of some 300 million year old mountains. From there you can see almost the entire Sierra de la Culebra, in Zamora. To the north are the forests. To the south, there are large extensions of woodland with hardly any trees. A binocular eye can make out a hustle and bustle of machinery and trucks transporting black logs. In 2022, 34,000 of its 70,000 ha were charred in two devastating wildfires. Four people died.

These were two incidents separated by barely a month, caused by lightning strikes and driven at high speed by dry and very hot weather conditions, the result of climate change. The official data say that, at some moments, the flames were advancing at 18 meters per second, or almost 65 km/h. The pine forest strip between the towns of Tábara and Mahíde burned almost completely. It is a 30-kilometer line of burned trees.

“We will see other fires in our lives, but I don’t think we will see anything like that one,” says Eduardo, a resident of Boya, a village of just 56 inhabitants that belongs to Mahíde itself. Its chestnut groves, famous in the region, were burned that year. “Now there are neither mushrooms nor chestnuts.”

Unfortunately, Eduardo’s vision – who was evacuated during the fire and now raises some native sheep that they were able to release to save them – does not seem like an accurate prediction. The forecast is that huge, devastating and uncontrollable fires will occur more often due to global warming.

“It’s going to happen again, it’s clear to us because we don’t see any decisive and adequate actions being taken,” predicts Lucas Ferrero, a resident of Villanueva de Valrojo and president of the association La Culebra no se calla. “We have our voice, but it’s another thing if they take any notice of us,” he complains. “We’ll have a fire like this again, but instead of 30 years from now, in 15.”

Ferrero refers, among other things, to the fact that “in the end they are repopulating with pine trees and they ended up telling us that they are going to let the native species grow naturally. And I think that the best thing would be to start by not destroying with machinery”.

The issue of returning to the pine forests or trying to reafforest the Culebra with different, less vulnerable varieties has been fluttering around since the flames were extinguished. The organization Ecologistas en Acción issued a statement of rejection when it was learned that the Junta de Castilla y León considered it acceptable to resort to pine reforestations because there were pollen records of these species from 10,000 years ago and, therefore, they would be autochthonous. “They are pyrophytes” and that, the ecologists argued, worsens the spread.

The truth is that the large pine forests of La Culebra -which were burned in 2022- were the result of reforestation begun in the 1940s to try to stop the rampant erosion of a territory without trees. Before that, a full-fledged arboricide had been taking place for centuries, especially the species most adapted to the climatic conditions of this part of the Iberian Peninsula: the melojo oaks.

“It seems that we do not learn anything, especially at the level of administrations. We, the citizens, I think we do, but, really, sometimes it makes you want to throw it all away,” Ferrero concludes.

At the beginning of April, almost two years after those disasters, the Culebra mountain range has received record rains after months and months of drought and unusual temperatures. So in many parts of this scorched land grass has sprouted where once there were trees. “As it turns green you seem to forget the seriousness of what has happened,” says Javier Talegón, a biologist and a true guide to the Culebra mountain range where he has worked for decades.

“The first lesson we should learn after such a great destruction is, before doing anything, to ask ourselves: what do we want? Do we want the sierra to be a land of timber and fuel production or do we want it to be a space of functional and resilient ecosystems in the face of climate change? Because these habitats require heterogeneity and, before the fires, up to 30% of the surface of La Culebra was made up of uniform pine forests,” says Talegón.

The “monocultures” of these coniferous trees, which were established many decades ago with the idea of holding the soil on the one hand, but having an economic resource on the other, have proved to be accelerators of fires once the spark has been ignited by lightning, human negligence or the will of an arsonist.

Looking at the heathers that have bloomed this season “for the first time after the flames”, the biologist clarifies that the low vegetation “is the cover of a soil very impoverished by the constant burning practices of the human management carried out here historically”. This is the origin of his demand, at the foot of the mountains, to rethink what we want to do here.

“I see the farms of people who don’t live here on a daily basis, in what condition they are in, and I say to myself: what difference does it make how we manage them if we don’t want them to be combustible because, in the end, we run the same risk,” Ferrero comments.

And he continues: “If you go from Codesal to the north, towards Puebla de Sanabria, you see that we have not learned too much. Not even the town councils, which should have demanded from the Junta a security perimeter in the municipalities and there are none. You just have to walk around and see it: the bush is getting into the villages. The brooms and urces are the size of an oak tree”.

In the foothills of the municipality of Villardeciervos, one of the villages where the flames raged mercilessly, you can see a glowing plaque that reads: “Danger of fire. Zone protected by video surveillance”. The images are captured from kilometers away on a new 30-meter tower that one comes across, precisely, when going up the trail to Peña Mira. “We want there to be more prevention, because it seems that everything can be solved by hiring more firefighters, but that’s not the case,” says Ferrero.

The objective of the video surveillance -a 400,000 euro contract from the Junta de Castilla y León-, is to have the west of Zamora under control with the idea of reinforcing and investing in the extinguishing strategy. This is not the first time that this formula, which was first used in 2013 and which, according to the regional government, reduced forest fires by 65%, has been used. However, it seems that it did little good in the face of the new fires. The one that burned the Culebra, in the end, was driven to the irrigated farmlands to suffocate himself there because there was no way to suffocate him. When the flames met those fields that were no longer burning, they were finally extinguished. “The sunflowers put it out,” commented witnesses to the incident.

“The fire, paradoxical as it may seem, has opened some windows. I would bet on learning from what these two fires have taught us: the extensions of scorched pine are gigantic and, at the same time, we have seen how the patches of oaks that still existed in the Culebra had been scorched at the edges and saved in the center of those masses,” comments Talegón.

The biologist verified in the months following the fire that “in the melojares between Boya and Villardeciervos, the oaks lessened the violence of the fire while the more or less homogeneous pine forests were very affected”. For this reason, he asks “not to make the same mistakes of monoculture again, even if it takes longer to obtain the results. Even if it costs more”.

However, local groups, such as the one coordinated by Lucas Ferrero, also consider that it would be useful to have some resources to counteract the fire as soon as it is detected: “A minimum training and some means for a first shock when the risk is small and much can be done on a 50-centimeter flames. Citizen action has to count”.

Mega-fires are one of the clear impacts and challenges that the climate crisis poses to the countries of southern Europe. Its destruction is monstrous. In an incident like La Culebra, the loss in what researchers call “ecosystem services” – the natural functions of habitats that favor humans such as, for example, the regulation of water flow – can be counted in the millions of euros. A group of scientists from the University of Salamanca calculated that between 35 and 75 million euros had been lost in Zamora.

Climate change already dominates everything,” says biologist Javier Talegón, “it is the new key factor because the fires are already beyond the capacity of firefighting resources, so it is time to rethink the model that exists in the Sierra de la Culebra. If it is a biosphere reserve, if it brings together a series of habitats declared of interest, it is time to rethink the way in which we relate to it”.

On the way out of the mountains, when Eduardo is asked who has lost the most due to the fires, he answers quietly and standing in his meadow: “In one way or another, we have all lost”.