“We have hardly been able to eat or sleep since the eviction”

“At four or five in the afternoon they told us that we had to leave the house and, in our haste, we caught almost nothing. Just a couple of changes. Two dogs stayed there and we wanted to go at least to feed them and give them water, “said Begoña. “See the animals, at least see how the animals are,” Avelino repeated. When asked how they experienced the moment of leaving their home, along with one of their 15-year-old sons and another older daughter who has a baby just nine months old, they only manage to answer with a “phew!”. They do not find words to express the anxiety generated by an order as blunt and transcendental as “you have to leave your house now.” His daughter and grandson went with another relative to Icod. They preferred to stay as close to home as possible.

«That hillside was very ugly and what we went through we will never forget in our lives. Seeing my daughter attacked with the child I do not forget, “says this resident of Las Llanadas. The teenager who accompanied them entertains himself with his cell phone, apparently oblivious to everything. When he is asked if he is scared or if he has had a bad time, he shrugs and smiles. Begoña and Avelin recall that it is “the first fire he sees” and predict that “he will remember and we will not forget this in life either.”

Avelino, 58, can’t hide his tiredness or worry. In the midst of so much tension, he did not even approach the Las Llanadas sports center to ask for accommodation. They ended up spending the night on the floor of a neighbor’s living room.

“My mattress was hard,” Begoña jokes, remembering that she tried to rest for a while on the cold cement. “We didn’t sleep a wink,” confesses Avelino, who in the sweltering heat he had tried to take a snooze in his car. They looked at the hillside and saw everything “much better”, perhaps that is why they did not understand that they were not yet allowed to return home.

The Municipality of Los Realejos relocated a dozen families to local hotels on Saturday and asked all the evicted to go register in the Las Llanadas pavilion, where there were Social Services and Red Cross personnel, before going to the homes of relatives or friends. Due to nerves, ignorance or a certain modesty, Begoña and Avelino did not go through the pavilion and added to the suffering of the eviction a night that they will not be able to forget. Looking with fear at the flames on the slope of Tigaiga and desperate to be able to return home. They acknowledge that they stayed near the access control to the evacuated area in case they were allowed to return. That order was not yet scheduled for yesterday, waiting for the fire to definitively stop its progress.

“Now I’m hungry and I don’t have a penny to eat anything,” assured Avelino, who despite the information provided by the authorities had not understood that he could go to the neighborhood pavilion to receive food and care. THE DAY He put them in contact with the mayor of Festivals and Youth, José David Cabrera, who was in the area, and immediately took care of taking them to the pavilion so they could get water, sandwiches, juices and yogurts. “How come they didn’t come yesterday? There was everything and we would have sent them to a hotel », he lamented. Sometimes, and no matter how well thought out the devices are, there are people who stay on the sidelines.

Avelino repeated that he earns “nothing more than 420 euros” and that he could not go to a hotel. He couldn’t believe that the Realejero City Council was offering it to him for free, as an extraordinary measure in the face of the extremely complicated situation that Las Llanadas has been experiencing since Saturday.