In the darkness of the night, the flames seemed to engulf the houses of Colera. The fire reached the doors of the houses of some residents of this small Alt Empordà coastal municipality, who recounted how they felt real fear as the fire approached and they complied with the order to remain confined to their homes. The bravest speak of respect. The few use terms such as panic and terror. What both agree on is the feeling of helplessness, with the confidence that if things got complicated the firefighters would show up, but without the certainty if that would happen. The strike of the volunteer firefighters and the ban on action by the forest defense groups (ADF) lead residents to wonder if the fire would have gotten so close with them in the place.
Pau Martínez, who spends the summer with his family in a second residence in the municipality, prepared everything to run out at about three in the morning. “We were constantly updating the City Council’s Facebook and Twitter to check the latest information and we talked on WhatsApp with other neighbors,” he recalls. It got to a point where the north wind was blowing so strong and the fire was getting so close to the most northerly built-up part of Colera that the whole family got dressed, put their things in the car, and was about to flee. “You looked at the mountain and you saw fire everywhere,” explains Martínez, but since the road was closed, they chose to stay at home and wait for the wind to drop, blowing the fire from one side to the other.
And yes, it subsided. The fire continued its path of destruction along the valley towards the municipal area of ??Llançà. At sunrise, in Colera there was hardly any smoke in the distance, although later there were attempts that were reactivated and some residents even took four branches and began to extinguish them as best they could next to the train station, which they had all day the traffic interrupted between Figueres and Portbou, with its imposing monumental canopy that saw the fire very close.
Up to 300 members of the Generalitat Fire Brigade have been fighting the fire since Friday afternoon, when a forest fire started that burned 573 hectares before being considered stabilized this Saturday around 9:30 p.m. Most of them are forestry, although there are also some vineyards and grazing areas that acted as a firebreak and have precisely helped to prevent things from getting worse. A mosaic in the landscape that firefighters and rural agents always talk about so much, but which is still not common in the areas with the highest fire risk in Catalonia. Nor does it surprise anyone, the origin of the fire is already clear that it is of human origin, according to the rural agents, started next to a forest track that goes from Portbou to the reservoir of the municipality.
In Colera, and even more so in Portbou, they are unfortunately used to looking fire in the eye and enduring devastating fires. The one from 2012 is the most present in memory, when a father and daughter died trying to escape from the flames that turned the N-260 into a mousetrap. Since then, they have periodically had various scares on the mountain that surrounds the northernmost municipality in Catalonia. His mayor, Gael Rodríguez, is facing his first crisis as mayor after being elected just a month and a half ago and becoming the youngest mayor in the country. That youth made him keep his temper yesterday early in the afternoon after having spent the whole night up and down, first with the various police forces so present in the border town, and then following the operation from the command center set up next to the Llançà fire station.
From there, where a clear blue sky prevailed, the vacationers who came and went from the beach did not even imagine what was happening on the other side of the mountain. Only a few noticed it when they saw the five helicopters taking water near the coast to help with the extinction tasks from the air. In the morning it was especially difficult due to the wind, with gusts of more than 100 km/h, which prevented the large seaplanes mobilized for the emergency from being able to work first thing in the morning. The extinction was then left to the hands of the helicopters and the ground forces. In the afternoon, it was possible to take advantage of the calm of the north wind to use high-capacity aircraft and advance decisively in the extinction.
While the firefighters worked, in Colera and Portbou a certain normality was recovered. People went to the supermarket to buy and had a cool beer at the bar commenting on the play. With the current perimeter confinement, the residents could not leave the municipality, as in the times of the pandemic. To ensure compliance and facilitate the work of the fire brigade, the N-260 road remained closed almost all day yesterday, as it had been since Friday afternoon. Traffic was restored at half past seven in the evening, when the residents and tourists staying in the municipalities affected by the fire were able to move by car along the highway to return to their homes and temporary accommodation. Rail traffic is also expected to recover from early this morning as long as the technicians from the railway infrastructure manager (Adif) give the go-ahead after verifying that the infrastructure has not suffered any mishap due to the fire.
The shutdown of the train and the only way in and out by car for more than 24 hours left many residents and tourists staying in Portbou and Colera unable to return on Friday. One of them was Marta Bernals, who was spending a week at the Sant Miquel de Colera campsite and that day she went to the Roses water park. When they went to look for the phones at the ticket office, they had countless calls, but it was too late. What was supposed to be a pleasant day with the family, with their two children aged six and ten, ended up turning into a long excursion that has left them stranded in the Llançà sports hall, where the Red Cross provided mats and beds for could rest more than a hundred people who were in the same situation as Marta and her family. There were people of all ages, from children to a 91-year-old woman, the mother of Àngels Pujol, who, along with her daughter and other relatives, were also unable to return home when they returned from a funeral in Perpignan on Friday. All of them returned yesterday afternoon, before the sun went down, as soon as the Generalitat lifted the restrictions in force from Llançà.
Most of those affected were tourists, like Laura and Pierre, a young couple from the French city of Saint-Étienne, staying in an apartment in Portbou with their one-year-old baby. They went shopping in Figueres and when they returned they were also forced to spend the night in the pavilion. The child did not stop crying all night and despaired the parents, who were looking for a way to recover their suitcases left in the apartment and put an end to the vacation as soon as possible. Others took it with more resignation and spent time getting cool under the pines around the soccer field.
Food was taken care of by Amrik Sigh, a resident of Llançà with an Indian restaurant in Figueres, who arrived every so often with the trunk of his Tesla full of boxes of hot pizzas and trays full of apples. “It is the least we can do when there is a misfortune like this,” justified Sigh, who when the war in Ukraine broke out spent more than two months on the border cooking to feed all those people who were trying to flee the country and yesterday helped the neighbors next door to your house.
