“We are in danger while the fire is still out of control.” This expresses a young woman on the beach of Zahara of the Atunnes at dawn, twelve hours after a fire was declared in a mountain close to the beach of the Germans, municipality of Tarifa, but next to Zahara – local autonomous local entity dependent on Barbate. The fire, whose origin is located in the so -called Cueva del Moro, in a mountain that communicates the beach of the Germans and the cane with the dunes of Bologna, next to a restricted military zone and a protected natural place, to a sigh of the Camarinal lighthouse, advanced Monday at full speed encouraged by the wind of Levante, which pushed the flames towards the coast and, therefore, towards the urbanizations and the urbanizations Atlantic
This Tuesday from 10.30 in the morning the authorities have allowed the return to hotels and urbanizations to the foot of the mountain – at the height of the Meliá Atlanterra and the Atlantic Hotel -: the fire was still active before the work of the fire teams, which continued to throw water from both the earth equipment and from airplanes and helicopters that carry the water on the beach of Atlanter.
The landscape in the morning is bleak, with the black mountain, turned into coal where there was a low forest, and having left its mark a few meters from the single -family houses built on the hillside.
“I was preparing the food and I started to see the smoke,” says a middle -aged woman, accompanied by her two daughters and granddaughter: “We worry and decided to leave the apartment as soon as we started seeing the flames through the window.” They took the car to make the three kilometers that separate their urbanization of Atlanterra from Zahara de los Atunes. There were barely three in the afternoon, and one in the morning were at the Public College of the town, Miguel de Cervantes, enabled for those who, like them, had been left without a place to spend the night.
“At nine o'clock at night we had one hundred people,” explains a member of the Red Cross, who organizes the attention to evacuated people, after midnight, “and now we have more than 200 people in search of a place to sleep, but until three in the morning they will not finish arriving the beds from Malaga.”
The beds are actually a kind of sun lounge that are deployed by the Patio del Miguel de Cervantes where, while they arrive, people are lying on the floor on cardboard, blankets or what they find to avoid being directly on the ground. Others, however, choose to rest in school chairs waiting for the fire to end up going out.
And it is that the fire, which at about eight in the afternoon seemed to be controlling, did not finish being defeated at eleven o'clock at night when the authorities decided people-.
“I will sleep in some mattresses at the hotel,” explained Jorge, father of two young children who ran out of his apartment when the authorities ordered the evacuation of Atlanterra urbanizations. The Tui Blue hotel, such as the sports center, the public school of Zahara and the Church of Carmen have opened their doors to accommodate the hundreds of people who have been left without a roof in a place where the rooms can cost these days more than 300 euros a night and the two bedroom apartments are paid at about 1,500 euros per week.
Jorge's brother went to Seville when he left Atlanterra, where he has a house, but he preferred to try his luck staying in Zahara, and in the end he was unable to return home to sleep.
Angela, a friend of her, got a hole with her sister, her mother and her niece at another friend with whom she works in a restaurant in Zahara. “It's a small floor,” he explains, but enough for what is expected is just one night.
The beach of the Germans, on which ashes continue to fall in the early morning from Monday to Tuesday, receives its name from when in the forties many citizens of Germany settled in this enclave at the end of World War II. Some versions suggest that it was Nazis that sought refuge in the face of the defeat of Nazism; Other versions speak of a Nazi presence related to the surveillance of the strait during the war. Be that as it may, the truth is that it has ended up establishing a memory link between this place threatened by the flames unleashed on Monday with the memory of one of the worst nightmares of the twentieth century.
If eight decades ago, the German Beach was an uninhabited place in which groups of foreigners called attention, in August 2025 urban development does not stop in a place of dunes, with water supply problems for as many urbanizations as they grow and in which the single lane roads make the traffic of hundreds of cars of people evacuated by the flames.
And this was told by a journalist from Canal Sur Radio on Monday around 7:00 p.m., while the driver of the program put the music and cut him to talk about the “orderly” of an evacuation managed by the same Junta de Andalucía governed by the PP that does not finish put vital, such as access to water, for people who already multiply the population of this urban nucleus.
While some of the tourists who had nowhere to sleep were crowded in the beach with their beach, chiringuitos music like the moon. But what did not finish off was a fire that illuminated one night to satin for the hundreds of vacationers threatened by the flames.
This fire has produced six days after another that was declared at another point in the municipality of Tarifa, in the Paraje de la Peña and that forced 5,000 people last Tuesday, mostly campsites and hotels.
For this Monday's fire, the Infoca has deployed 14 aerial media, to which they have joined the fire parks of Chiclana, Benalup, Cádiz, Tarifa and Algeciras, as well as civil protection agents and the command of the Civil Guard of Cádiz and Tarifa, reports EFE.
