Seven specialists from National Police Corps arrived from Madrid investigate the fire that broke out on July 21 in Los Campeches, in the highlands of the municipality of Los Realejos, and that continues without being officially extinguished. It is the same enclave in which attempts were made on July 13 and 15 and in which on August 8 it was possible to stop another subsequent attempt for the flames to take over the mountain. The area is in the spotlight. Most of the main events of this type that have been recorded on the Island for decades have started there –like the one that in September 1983 affected more than 6,800 hectares or the one that in 2007 burned 15,000– and a long list of unequal attempts and fires.
It has long been taken for granted that the hand of man is behind it. This is confirmed by the head of the Organic Unit for Forest Fires and Associated Media of the Cabildo de Tenerife, José María Sánchez Linaje, considered one of the most outstanding experts on fires in the Canary Islands. «It is local people; people from the very close environment or with interests there », he says. «The municipality of Los Realejos and, specifically, Los Campeches have been the historic area, the red dot of the entire Archipelago; It was the place with the most fires in the Islands », he says about a problem that has been reduced in recent years. “Since 2014 the arsonist disappeared, there were no more fires and this summer is when we have had problems again”expresses the technician.
Los Campeches is not a town or even a hamlet. Nobody lives in the place as such. It is a place that, as the tourist website of the Los Realejos City Council explains, constitutes the same geographical and landscape unit as the natural spaces of Tigaiga and Ruiz. “It is an abrupt landscape of great beauty, outlined by large escarpments”, is collected in the aforementioned portal. There are orchards and some small tool room linked to them, but no houses. All crossed by a complex network of forest tracks, as can be easily seen thanks to the satellite image of Google Maps and applications such as Wikilok and Mapillary. Los Campeches gives its name to one of the paths and also to a ravine. Other of the most popular and closest are those of the Tube and Pino Llorón, according to Sergio Hernández, a hiker and cyclist from Tenerife with a considerable presence on the internet and who knows the environment well.
The population centers, yes, are close. Two of them, practically embedded in the mountain, are born around El Andén street and Los Chavocos road, both so high that Google Maps seems to get out of control when they arrive. They are prototypical neighborhoods of the North of Tenerife and even, for a moment, remind us of that neighborhood that Andrea Abreu describes in Panza de burro: a rise and self-built houses, some old and others new with large gates.
In particular, El Andén is a road with a considerable slope and, despite the fact that there is only room for one car on most of the route, it is enabled for going up and down. Late last Saturday morning, life unfolded there in the usual stillness of this type of place. The only noise was that of a bakery van coming down playing the pita. Neighbors in their homes, others in agricultural work… The street ends at its upper part on the TF-344 road, where a truck, a tractor and an old model of the Toyota Hilux were circulating, the vehicle par excellence of the Tenerife midlands. Below is the TF-342, which crosses the most central part of Icod el Alto.
With respect to the lands that are already located inside the mountain, some are still cultivated and others are abandoned. “In the previous crisis, almost all the orchards were put into production and people returned to the countryside for domestic economy, but, once that happened, agriculture is in decline,” says Sánchez Linaje. Another name of the environment and the fires in the Archipelago also stops in this aspect, such as the former councilor of the Cabildo de Tenerife Wladimiro Rodríguez Brito. “In recent years, much of this agricultural activity has collapsed,” he points out.
Social conflicts
“It is a territory that has good environmental connotations for rainfed agriculture and, on the other hand, it has social histories of a property that was highly concentrated and of a peculiar sharecropping and sharecropping system that has been maintained until a few years ago” , exposes Rodríguez, before adding: «That gives rise to social conflicts there come from afar». He also remembers about his years in the insular institution that they had a “very improvised surveillance center” to be able to control the space 24 hours a day.
According to Wladimiro Rodríguez’s account, that effort was due to two factors: “It was a conflictive area of fires and, what is worse, where the community is very supportive of each other and, consequently, very distrustful of outsiders, which surely has to do with the previous land ownership system». And he completes in that line: «At a time when I was there, there was a time of up to five fires a day; everyone suspected who he was, but none of the neighbors said so».
Information published in this newspaper in August 2010 estimated that fifteen intentional attempts were declared each year, according to the data provided by Rodríguez Brito himself. “It cannot be a coincidence that all the fires occur in the same area,” said the then head of the Tenerife Firefighters Consortium, Salvador Reyes. The newspaper library also shows that the concern and suspicions were shared by the Los Realejos City Council. “Here is a rare hand,” the former mayor Oswaldo Amaro had told the newspaper El País three years earlier, coinciding with the 2007 fire.
a week in suspense
The position held by Amaro is currently occupied by Adolfo González. “It was almost a week in which we lived in suspense before an uncontrolled fire that was affecting one of the main resources of the municipality, its landscape, and that left behind desolation and the loss of essential crops for the economy of many neighbors” , analyzes after what has now happened the local councilor, and highlights a fact to show the dimension of the fire: «More than half a thousand neighbors and their animals had to be evicted».
In the days after the fire, his counterpart from San Juan de la Rambla, Jesús Ezequiel Domínguez, expressed his concern, and asked for measures to put an end to the fires in the aforementioned space. “If they locate the one who did it and evidence is obtained, let the full weight of the law fall. But other types of measures must also be taken, for example to raise awareness, given the fact that the same thing happens every year in Los Campeches. Something has to be done,” he demanded.
Surveillance work
Social networks have recently become the support for demands of all kinds: a seaplane base, more helicopters, more media in general… and also surveillance in Los Campeches. However, from the Cabildo de Tenerife they affirm that, even despite the fire truce that occurred since 2014, there have been resources deployed in anticipation of what could happen. “We always kept some vigilant means, some patrol going around there, some light vehicle with water…”, specifies José María Sánchez Linaje.
Another of the data provided by the technician is that the start of the fire usually moves within a radius of approximately 500 meters, and uses the term arsonist in its manifestations, more generic than arsonist, which includes a pathological component. Be that as it may, the investigations carried out on the ground for decades make the intention clear.
According to Sánchez Linaje, the administrations with powers in forest management activate a process after the fires in which, among other tools, they resort to tables of indicators in which they rule out possibilities: «Have there been storms or lightning? Has there been a pilgrimage those days, flyers, parties in the next town…? Have there been fires in the area on previous dates that could have generated an incandescent particle that would have fallen and remained there, building the fire little by little until one day, due to the conditions that exist, it has started with a flame? Has there been an accident, working with sparking tools, or grazing?” In Los Campeches the answer is always the same: “No”.
A labyrinth of forest trails crossed by ravines
Los Campeches is located in the vicinity of the El Asomadero viewpoint and the Chanajiga recreational area, as the most tangible and well-known points. A track also bears the name of Los Campeches, as does a ravine. The first connects with those of the Tube, Pino Llorón and Lolita. For its part, two of the closest population centers are those that arise around El Andén street and Los Chavocos road.
