A wildfire in southern Spain killed at least 12 people and left 23 others missing after flames spread rapidly through woodland near Los Gallardos on Thursday afternoon. Emergency workers were still battling to contain the fire on Friday as families fled and evacuation routes turned dangerous almost as soon as they were opened.
That urgency was clear in Bédar, where Lucinda Curtois and Riyaz Cheytan were in the pool with their teenage children at about 19:00 local time when neighbours warned them of an evacuation notice. Curtois said the scene changed in minutes: “Within 15 minutes there was a tiny bit of haze, to black smoke, to flames,” and she called it “really frightening and unbelievably quick.”
She and Cheytan bundled the children into the car and headed for the main road, only to find the blaze already there. “We turned the corner and all of a sudden the fire was there, there were two coaches of people evacuating too,” Cheytan said. The family later reached a hotel about half an hour away, but they said some friends who had set off walking to leave were currently missing.
Officials said the flames appeared to start after an electricity pole fell in woodland in the Los Gallardos area of Almería. The fire then raced beyond that patch of countryside, forcing people out of Bédar, Los Gallardos and Mojacar and leaving a trail of ash, smoke and confusion that witnesses said made a normal escape impossible.
Peter Chapman and Shelagh were at their holiday home in Mojacar when the warning signs first appeared. “Then there was that smell of smoke in the air,” Chapman said. “You could see a glow in the sky in the distance.” By Friday morning, the pair woke to ash and smoke in the air, while Peter Rowlinson in Los Gallardos said, “We left last night, the smoke was horrendous. We had to get out. The house is still there but there is ash everywhere.”
Rowlinson said “hundreds” of people had been displaced, a figure that fits with the wider picture of a fire that moved faster than people could react. The immediate question now is how many of the 23 missing remain unaccounted for, and how far the fire ultimately ran before crews brought any part of it under control.
