In Vilamartín de Valdeorras (Ourense) the neighbors had been preparing for the arrival of the flames for two days. The fire turned on Wednesday in Larouco and extended on both sides of the Valley in which the Valdeorras region is based, so they, from the north flank, knew it was a matter of time to appear in their territory. He did it. And the neighbors repeat that they saw themselves and that they had to defend the houses as they could. “It was known that it was going to happen, but nobody came. There must be forecast in who has the device,” says Jovita Fernández, who saw the danger at the door of her house.
The fire, repeat professionals, volunteers and neighbors these days, runs at high speed and reaches an intensity that they say they have not seen before. In Vilamartín they prepared with tractors, water tatters, shovels and what they found by hand. Seeing what they were coming, the City Council itself called for those who had agricultural machinery that could be useful for them to collaborate. They established a meeting point, in the lower part of the town, where those who get off the fire can eat and drink something. That, if it gives them time: the notices are continuous.
Organized among them, the neighbors say that many houses saved, but there are villages that have been razed. This is the case of San Vicente, that an old man resisted abandoning. They found him safe, but desolate, who were this Sunday to check what had stood. The videos that Pilar Fernández Nogueira has taken and that accompany this information show both the houses burning in the middle of the night and the desolation in daylight.
She explains that she went up because there was some older person who did not want to evict San Vicente despite the risk. It is the town from which their family proceeds and they still have a house there, who saw burn, he explains. She is already in Córgomo, a nucleus to which the fire threatened Sunday at noon both from above and from below. The neighbors try to protect it expedively: they are cutting a group of trees to prevent them from turning on; A work shovel is making cuts between the fields as a firewall.
From the road, a group of people observe next to a tractor loaded with water, in case the flames arrive. In a nearby hill, crowned by pines, the fire appears and it is a matter of minutes that all the trees are engulfed.
The fire rumble
In that group Raúl appears, which stops a moment to tell how the fire has seen jumping between the trees directly from the cup in the glass, razing hectares “in seconds” and moving forward with a great rumble. The neighbors speak of other villages that have run a luck similar to that of San Vicente: o Robledo, or Mazo, Cernego. From the latter he has had to escape Nagore Fincias, who says they have burned at least ten houses, half of them “habitable.” It says so because in this nucleus there are only four neighbors who live there all year. They have saved their houses. The others are residents only during some seasons.
When the fire reached its doors, they went out to fight it “with minimal means,” says Fincias. “There were some tractors, we have used what we have been able to,” he recounts and describes as “shameful” that the fire device, which is overflowed with the amount of fires in the province, does not reach there, when the fire is cornered village after village.
The efforts of the residents were not enough. There is only an access to Cernego, they were surrounded and they had to leave “running,” he says. It is now housed in a shelter enabled by the City Council. Beside him, Jovita Fernández speaks between crying, helplessness and outrage: “The Xunta has failed one hundred percent. They left us abandoned.”
“Like a mountain melting”
She is one of the neighbors who had been looking at the mountain for days. He says he was refreshing the land near the house when he began to hear “a deafening noise” from the fire. “It seemed that the mountain was melting whole,” he says. It is impressed by the speed of the flames, although it has already lived several fires in a region, that of Valdeorras, accustomed to them -and especially whipped in the great fires of 2022. But “nothing like this.” The pine crusts are released and shot, turned into paves the size of one hand, he explains. These fragments easily cause new spotlights where they fall.
Jovita Fernández complains that the situation was critical at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, but the first troops, which were from the Emergency Military Unit (UME), appeared at 20.00, “when everything had ended.” Ask for more means intended for prevention and extinction of fireworks that, for her, have an unusual force. And that the teams work all year. “We are an abandoned region,” protests.
