Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Aug 22, 2006 - 10:43 AM environment

The weather has settled here now, and we even had something of a cold snap last week. In places like Seville in deepest inland Andalusia, the thermometer can still be expected to hit 38ºC (100ºF), but in most of the country temperatures for the rest of the month are not forecast to rise much above 31ºC (87ºF), in other words, it'll be loverly and warm. The heat wave and lack of rainfall during the last two years have taken a terrible toll, though, as Spain, particularly Galicia, has been battered by a series of devastating forest fires on the same scale that Portugal suffered in 2004 and 2005. Read on for more about this year's forest fires.

Although there is much talk of pyromaniacs and arsonists and conspiracies of different ilks (land speculators, right-wing provocateurs, etc.), the biggest culprits for the fires are the unique Galician climate (Atlantic and lush in winter, Mediterranean and tinder-dry in summer), and decades of disastrous land management policies (what on earth are all those pine forests doing there, anyway?. Answer: traditional farming in Galicia has been massively abandoned, usually in favour of non-labour-intensive (especially when poorly tended) forestation).

I am not totally discounting the human factor, of course, and have no reason to doubt the estimate that 90% of the fires had a human-provoked origin. I am sceptical about the conspiracy theories, though, and, even if such widespread malice exists, it could only wreak effect under suitable environmental conditions. The European heat wave in July and the beginning of August was most intense in the north of Spain, and Galicia was a disaster waiting to happen.