Visit Las Médulas and see them burn just a few hours later

What began as a family meeting weekend ended, in its last hours, marked by the fire that advanced without control. I have spent the last three days in Las Médulas, the only World Heritage declared by UNESCO in the province of León, where I was born and lived until the age of 18. My family and I arrived at the town of Carucedo, who would later be evicted by the flames, when the fire had not yet been declared, when it was difficult to imagine what was to come. But sometimes what we believe distant and others can touch us closely.

The fire began on Saturday afternoon in the town of Yeres. That same morning, we started from the Las Médulas Visitors Center to take a guided tour of the natural space, its reddish 'bites' mountains and its centenary chestnut trees, the same ones that today are naked by the flames. Las Médulas are an open gold mine exploited by the Roman Empire, turned into the tourist heart of the El Bierzo region, but they are not just that: they are a symbol of local pride that sews memories that sail from generation to generation.

That magical and unmatched landscape that only a few hours before we contemplated with the same astonishment is always razed by a fire that He ended up entering to the natural place while the main politicians of the province They were fair in Asturias. Overwhelms verify the virulence with which it happened when seeing the calcined photos of what we had seen alive the day before. Going up to the viewpoint of Orelán on Saturday at sunset, on which a column of fire was seen in the distance, was still possible. This Monday morning, the panoramic balcony dawned totally burned.

Everything changed on Sunday after eating. The wind turned and caused the lack of control of the fire that at first seemed dominated. And the medulla began to burn while we visited the Castreña craft beer factory, a local business raised with dedication and effort by Carlos and Nerea in Carucedo. That visit was like a time tunnel: how to leave a world behind and return to a different one, a tragic one in which the people, orange and with a smell of smoke, would end up evicted shortly after.

Carucedo would become a ghost town surrounded by flamesas can be seen in the videos recorded by emergencies, by the press present and by neighbors who uploaded the images to social networks. This video shared in X (formerly Twitter) by the journalist Juan Navarro García (@Juan13Navarro) shows precisely the Castreña brewery ravaged by the fire.

I had just left when the order to leave the town came, but my relatives planned to stay one more day there. The tension and pain intermingled with the rush to collect as soon as possible. They returned to their homes, but those who left their own felt the expensive uncertainty of not knowing how they would find them when they returned.

Losing a home is not just losing the walls that shelter us. It is also losing part of the memory that builds us and that is in the small things. In objects, photos, memories … houses are also an invisible file of our lives. The emotional effects of fire will last time: homes, business, animals, work and effort, life stories. It is the floor that see birth, the ground that welcomes and that gives identity. Something breaks inside when the land you love is destroyed.