when Nancy Castro and her husband Constantino Ballesteros walked up to their small cellar on Camí de l’Ermita (Tijarafe) yesterday, accompanied by a firefighting team, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Their home for the past 25 years, where they had deposited all their dreams, had disappeared engulfed in flames. In just over an hour and a half, the fire swept away three decades of the Tendal winery’s history.
“I’ts horrible. We are in a kind of cloud. We can’t believe what has happened”, said 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 some of what they have lost, but there are “irreplaceable things”. “Insurance is money, but we won’t get everything back from 25 years ago,” says Nancy. She and her husband are rethinking their whole lives. “I don’t know if we will start again. We are already a different age and it is not easy”, he says.
Nancy, who is from La Palma, met her husband Constantino, who is Mancheque, when they were both studying Enology 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. “Our last 25 years were there. In an hour and a half everything disappeared”, he says.
His 25-year-old son is a wine technician and had already started working at the winery. “For him it is being a hard blow. From tomorrow we have to start making decisions: do we continue with this or leave it”, says Nancy, who laments the bad luck that the island of La Palma is having, which experienced a volcanic eruption in 2021 that destroyed hundreds of homes. “It seems we are cursed”, he says.
Nancy’s sentiment is shared by many residents of La Palma. One of the volunteers who has been working since Saturday at the Severo Rodríguez pavilion in Los Llanos de Aridane attending to the evacuees, who prefers not to reveal her identity, assures that the inhabitants of La Palma see this fire as “another punishment” . “The society of La Palma had not yet recovered from the volcano and now this is coming to us. Emotionally it is being very hard”, he points out.
Among those who have lost their home due to the fire is a family that “ran away” from the Aridane valley when the lava ate their house and has now lost their new home again in Puntagorda. “‘Again?’ is the only thing they constantly repeat because they refuse to talk to anyone”, points out this volunteer, who points out that the fire has once again caused ash to rain in Los Llanos and even in Fuencaliente , as during the eruption. “It’s like reliving the same thing. It’s back to zero. They have even recommended us to use masks like then”, he points out.
At the end of the afternoon, the residents of the helmets of Tijarafe and Puntagorda were allowed to return. The fire, which has affected about 4,000 hectares and destroyed 20 homes, gave a respite yesterday after the weather conditions changed. Temperatures dropped almost ten degrees yesterday, humidity rose above 65% and wind gusts dropped to 18 kilometers per hour.
The extinguishing teams made up of more than 550 troops and 11 aerial vehicles – nine helicopters and two seaplanes – managed to contain the flames on the right flank and keep it away from the houses. The front of the Caldera de Taburiente is a concern, although as the president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, indicated yesterday, “it is progressing slowly”. The risk of this front is that the fire crosses the caldera and rises towards the municipalities of Paso, Puntallana, Los Sauces and Barlovento.
The Civil Guard suspects that the fire started in a container in a recreational area of ??Fayal, in Puntagorda. The mayor of the municipality, Vicente Rodríguez, indicated yesterday that it could have been “recklessness”, although he was surprised by the time and the area.
