When Nancy Castro and her husband, Constantino Ballesteros, went yesterday to their small winery on Camino de la Ermita (Tijarafe) accompanied by a firefighting team, they couldn't believe what they saw. Their work for 25 years, where they had deposited all their dreams, had disappeared engulfed by flames. In barely an hour and a half, the fire destroyed three decades of history of the Tendal Winery.
"It's awful. We are in a kind of cloud. We cannot believe what has happened”, indicated Nancy yesterday. The fire destroyed the machinery and all the wines in the warehouse, as well as the main building. Nancy acknowledges that the insurance will cover a part, but there are “irreplaceable things”.
“Insurance is money, but we are not going to recover everything that is there from 25 years ago,” says Nancy. She and her husband are rethinking their entire lives. “I don't know if we will start again. We are already of another age and it is not easy, ”she indicates.
Nancy, who is from La Palma, met her husband, Constantino, who is from La Mancha, when they were both studying Oenology in Ciudad Real. After getting married and after living on the Peninsula for two years, they decided to return to La Palma and start in 1999 with a small winery and some vineyards that belonged to Nancy's father. “There were our last 25 years. In an hour and a half, everything disappeared, ”she says.
His 25-year-old son is an oenology technician and had already started working in the winery. “For him it is being a stick. Starting tomorrow we have to start making decisions, if we continue with this or leave it”, says Nancy, who laments the bad luck that the island of La Palma is having, which in 2021 experienced a volcanic eruption that took hundreds of homes ahead. "It seems that we are cursed," she says.
Nancy's feeling is shared by many palmeros. One of the volunteers who has been working in the Severo Rodríguez pavilion in Los Llanos de Aridane since Saturday, attending to the evacuees and who prefers not to give her identity, assures that the palmeros see this fire as "another punishment." “The palmera society had not yet recovered from the volcano and now this is coming to us. Emotionally it is being very hard ”, she points out.
Among those who have lost their home due to the fire is a family that "fled" from the Aridane Valley when the lava ate their house and who have now lost their new home in Puntagorda. "Again? It's the only thing they constantly repeat because they refuse to talk to anyone," says this volunteer, who points out that the fire has once again caused ash rain in Los Llanos and even in Fuencaliente, as during the eruption. “It's like living the same thing again. It is to return to zero point. They have even recommended that we use masks like then, ”she points out.
Regarding the evolution of the fire, yesterday part of the 4,200 people who were evacuated were allowed to return home. Late in the afternoon, the residents of the Tijarafe and Puntagorda towns were allowed to return. The fire, which has affected some 4,000 hectares and destroyed 20 homes, took a breather yesterday after the weather conditions changed. The thermometers dropped almost ten degrees yesterday, the humidity increased above 65% and the wind gusts dropped to 18 kilometers per hour.
The firefighting teams made up of more than 550 troops and 11 aerial means – nine helicopters and two seaplanes – managed to contain the flames on the right flank and keep them away from the houses. The front of the Caldera de Taburiente is worrying, although, as the President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, indicated yesterday, "advances slowly." The risk of this front is that the fire crosses the caldera and ascends towards the municipalities of El Paso, Puntallana, Los Sauces and Barlovento.
The Civil Guard suspects that the fire started in a container in a recreational area of El Fayal, in Puntagorda. The mayor of the municipality, Vicente Rodríguez, indicated yesterday that it could have been "reckless", although the time and the area puzzled him.
