‘The breath just went out of us’: people return to their homes after wildfires near Madrid

The handwritten sign taped to the front gate of a house in the mountains an hour west of Madrid offered as succinct a summary of recent events as you will find.

“EMPTY,” it said. “No people or animals here.”

The quiet streets of El Morro, a hamlet on the outskirts of the town of Navas del Rey, held further evidence: two burnt-out cars barely identifiable as an Audi and a Seat; blackened gnomes atop a gatepost; charred hedges whose leaves had crumbled to a fine ash; and, everywhere, the smell of burnt, or still smouldering, wood.

On Wednesday, almost a week after the area was one of many evacuated as firefighters rushed to contain the blazes that have consumed tens of thousands of hectares of land west of the Spanish capital, the returning residents of El Morro were trying to process what had happened. Some phoned their insurance companies, some swept up the debris in and around their homes, and some were still too deep in shock.

A man led his elderly father out of a house that had been gutted by fire, telling him it was time to go and get a change of clothes. “We’re all doing so-so,” said the son, which seemed brave but unlikely.

Towards the outskirts of the El Morro, a couple in late middle-age walked around what had been their garden. The house had survived bar some smoke staining, but the garden and the patio furniture had been chewed up by the fire.

“We came back to the village, saw what had happened and the breath just went out of us,” said the woman.

Mercedes Merino, who has lived in El Morro for 35 of her 70 years, apologised for being able to offer visitors nothing but lukewarm water – the electricity was still off – as she pointed to her blackened garden, with its flame-twisted cypress, dying loquat and sooty swimming pool. Still, at least her house had been spared.

“We’ve had fires here before, but nothing like this,” she said. “I knew what we were coming back to because lots of videos of the village have been going round. We’re all feeling really low. Some people are crying and some people have lost their houses, like the guy next door.”

Like the burnt-out cars, next door bore little resemblance to what it had once been. Rather than a house, it was a tangle of warped and burnt building materials, its roof collapsed into ripples of tile and its chimney absurdly horizontal.

“The firefighters have been amazing,” said Merino. “But how do you stop fires like these when you live in mountains covered with pine trees? We must have a guardian angel who was watching over us and protecting our house.”

Across the road, Javier Herraiz and his family, who had just returned to El Morro after fleeing southwest to Cáceres, were sitting down to a tortilla and counting their blessings.

The smoke that rose over the mountains towards the end of last week, combined with a visit from the Guardia Civil to warn them that an evacuation order was imminent, had persuaded them to leave sooner rather than later.

Although the damage that greeted them when they returned home on Wednesday morning was minimal, the state of the mountains and the hamlet had shaken them.

“What we saw when we got here was just Dantesque,” said Herraiz, 68. “It’s such a beautiful place but all of a sudden, it had come to look like hell.”

The damage to the family home amounted to little more than a warped pipe and those loss of a rainwater tank, which had probably helped protect the property as it melted and disgorged its contents over the terrace beneath.

“We’ve been so lucky,” said Herraiz. “Some people have lost their houses and some of them still have mortgages to pay.”

Eva Manso, whose home backs on to steep, wooded hillside, credited a sturdy brick wall – and probably a large measure of luck – with protecting her house from the flames. The wall had certainly done its job; the hills on the other side were black, its trees naked and clawed by the heat of the flames.

“We’ve never been through anything like this,” said Manso. “Yes, we had the Covid lockdown and Storm Filomena, but they were nothing like this. I don’t think anyone thought this would happen.”

That sense of bafflement, shock and fear was as evident in El Morro as it must be across the swathes of Spain that have been affected by another year of wildfires, from Madrid and the neighbouring province of Ávila to the eastern region of Valencia.

“I never cry over life’s difficult moments, but I sometimes cry over silly little things like a mosquito being squashed,” said Merino as she sat on her porch and looked over her ruined garden.

“Maybe I’ll find myself crying in a week’s time and I won’t be able to stop.”