11.00: First post of the day.

The fires in Pontevedra province have abated but smoke still hangs over the city itself, blown from the still-smouldering mountains to the east. The cities of Santiago and Ourense – north and south east of us – are now those which are most threatened by active fires.

I visited this morning the region inland from Pontevedra city and the devastation is immense. God knows how long it will be before it recovers its verdure. The curious thing, as I’ve said before, is that few of the trees have been destroyed completely. As a result, there are now vast stretches of blackened, petrified forest. The open land, however, has been completely laid waste, as the Before and After pictures below show. Most surprising, though, is how little damage has been done to buildings, gardens and adjacent little vineyards. In fact, I could see none at all, even where the flames had encroached up to the garden walls. There was even one small patch of corn entirely surrounded by fields of ashes. Quite how the residents managed to protect their property I don’t know but I suspect they stood defiantly with hose in hand. It must have been terrifying.

All the ecologist groups prefer [like me] to blame poor land management for this disaster, though I guess you wouldn’t expect them to say anything else; they are hard to please. But they do stress this awful year is not unprecedented and suggest a 10 year cycle. And, worryingly, they point to the risk of further damage if the rains forecast for later this week are heavy enough to erode the naked soil and wash silt into the rivers and estuaries which are Galicia's jewel.

Fernando has suggested the Galicians may not deserve their beautiful land but they surely don’t merit their dis-united, mud-slinging politicians. Here’s a few examples of the juvenile comments being bandied about in the midst of the region’s worst crisis in living memory:-
‘These sort of problems always arise when there are incompetent, divided coalition governments in power’
‘These fires are clearly part of a strategy aimed at destabilising the region and bringing down the government’
‘You only have to look at the map of the fires and compare voting patterns to realise what is going on.’

A minor but sad aspect of the fires is the death of dozens of the semi-wild horses that roam the Galician mountains. The panic engendered by the flames may well explain the horse droppings I’ve seen this morning in the forest behind my house. It’s quite a while since I saw evidence of horses this close to the houses.

Of greater concern to the besieged smallholders, though, is the increased incursions of wild boars into the corn fields which have survived. Just what the owners needed.

There is still a lot of talk from national and local politicians of criminal conspiracy. But if the local governments – both this one and the last one – really have not only under-invested in fire prevention but also exacerbated the situation via partisan ‘nationalist’ employment policies, then the real crime committed will not have been one of arson.

So I predict the smokescreen will continue until such time as things have been forgotten and no one appreciates that there have been no arrests and convictions. Not for the first time, apparently.