The biggest fear for senior citizens taking refuge in Benavente, a town in a zone ravaged by vast wildfires in Spain, is that “everything they own could burn”, its mayor Beatriz Asensio told AFP.
She was speaking as she visited a temporary shelter in her municipality, in Zamora province in the Castilla y León region, hosting residents from surrounding areas who had been evacuated ahead of fast-moving fire fronts.
Many were elderly, reflecting the demographic decline in much of rural Spain.
Zamora has the greatest concentration of residents in Spain aged over 80, representing 12.3 percent of the province’s population, according to official statistics.
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Ourense, in the neighbouring region of Galicia – also weathering wildfires – was close behind, with 12.1 percent.
The fires burning in the north and west of Spain have destroyed more than 350,000 hectares (865,000 acres) in the past weeks, killing four people. Authorities say they are only now starting to come under control.
“In Zamora province, we have an extremely large number of elderly, a lot of people who live alone, a little helpless,” said Jesús José González Tejada, the commander of Zamora’s civil guard, which was tasked with evacuating the at-risk residents.
“There are times you have to remind them: ‘Please get your medicine, things you need, some clothes, your mobile phone to be able to tell your family, a charger, very important,” he told AFP.
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A past consumed by flames
Among many of the elderly, a shared fear raised its head: that of irreparable loss, the possibility of needing to rebuild but lacking the youth and money to do so.
Amelia Bueno, 79, from the northern Asturias region, has spent more than 30 summers vacationing in Ribadelago Nuevo, a lakeside village in Zamora, from which she was evacuated.
She never sought to holiday anywhere else. “I’ve spent 32 years coming for vacation… Don’t take me away or send me someplace else,” she said.
Yet, she accepts with resignation the situation she is facing.
“The most important thing is that no one gets hurt. And that we’re all right and being looked after. And that this is the hardest thing that could happen to us.”
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Pedro Fernández, 85, followed a well-trodden path, of leaving when young to live and work in Barcelona, but hanging on to his parents’ home in the region, in Vigo de Sanabria, for his vacations.
“Starting over again at my age wouldn’t make any sense,” he told AFP.
“I’m really afraid for my house,” he said. “I inherited the house from my father, and if it’s destroyed it can’t be rebuilt. Building a house like that today would cost a fortune.”
In his case, though, fortune smiled.
Fernández and others from Vigo de Sanabria were able to return to the village on Friday, where they found their properties undamaged.
The same cannot be said of many other Spanish villages, where the flames have consumed the buildings – and with them the past and their memories.
