As Spain’s worst wildfires on record tore through the countryside, Elena Sánchez stepped away from her job selling beer at a kiosk beside an artificial lake in Madrid and gestured toward a sunset that didn’t look the way it should.
Standing near the lake on Sunday evening, the 54-year-old pointed to a hazy gray tint on the horizon, residue from smoke drifting in from fires burning roughly 30 miles away. She said the acrid smell of burning had settled over the entire park in recent days, and while conditions eased slightly over the weekend, many people initially stopped exercising outdoors because the smoke irritated their throats, with older residents resorting to surgical masks. She said she could still taste it.
Madrid has spent recent years transforming into a thriving European capital, drawing wealthy expatriates, immigrant workers and growing international attention, says a profile done by The NY Times. But as flames pushed into new areas around the city on Monday and spread further across the country, that sense of prosperity has collided with a much harsher reality.
In a country whose government has staked much of its identity on taking climate change seriously, the fires have crept uncomfortably close to the capital, reducing regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso to tears and prompting experts to warn that this may only be a preview of worse damage to come on the world’s fastest-warming continent.
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Speaking Monday afternoon at a news conference in Castellón, on Spain’s eastern coast, where a separate fire forced thousands more evacuations, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the situation as difficult and called for a national pact among all of Spain’s political parties to work together against fires he attributed directly to climate change. He said the current climate emergency is exceeding every threshold scientists have warned Spain and Europe about for years.
Regional authorities ordered the evacuation Monday of Valdemaqueda, a town of roughly 870 people about 25 miles from Madrid, another indication that the fires west of the capital remained far from contained. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said firefighters have a critical two-day window to bring the Madrid-area fires under control before extreme heat, with temperatures expected to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, hits the country.
The scale of it all has unsettled Madrid residents, many of whom say they can’t recall a fire of this size ever coming so close to the city. Leopoldo Salvador, 84, walking beneath a statue of Don Quixote in Plaza España, called it a wake-up call, saying he’d kept his windows shut over the weekend despite mild temperatures just to keep the smoke out.
Near the royal palace, Cristina Herrero, a 46-year-old biology professor at Complutense University of Madrid, checked news updates on her phone while walking sheepdogs she and friends had evacuated from farms outside the city. As the dogs barked at unleashed animals nearby, she apologized to another dog walker, explaining that hers were evacuees.
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She said she’d left behind sheep, horses and beehives on the farms, and that while the city itself still felt insulated, people living just west of Madrid were deeply worried.
For Sánchez, back at her kiosk by the lake, the smoke was something entirely new. Weeks of record-breaking heat had already worn her down, she said, and climate change increasingly felt unstoppable, no matter how many resources or laws the country throws at it. Watching the discolored sunset, she said simply that the fire keeps spreading, and that she just hopes it doesn’t reach her.
