Fire, Fire: Balearics ablaze

Pour on water, pour on water.

Ibiza has been burning. So has Mallorca. A couple of afternoons ago, there was a plume of smoke to be seen rising somewhere past Can Picafort. Lazing for a while on the beach, there were suddenly bits of burnt debris drifting on the wind and settling on the sand. Some people started to get into a bit of a panic. There are those moments on a beach when you become aware of everyone looking at something. And there it was. Another cloud of smoke. Quite a bit closer. At which point I thought perhaps I ought also to panic.

Legging it back from the beach, I had visions of a conflagration. Burning houses and exploding cars. Nothing of the sort. It was a fair distance away. By Albufera, en route to Muro town. The burnt stuff was flying about, however. Loads of it, charred confetti, toasted ticker-tape. Seemed a pretty extreme way of finally putting a halt to the golf course, ventured I, but no one seemed to appreciate the joke. As far as I'm aware, the fire and the course were, and are, unrelated.

A Canadair fire-fighter was in full flight, passing low over Albufera and putting on its water-gathering show for those on the beach who hadn't panicked. The air was distinctly smoky. Two fires going off simultaneously, and the wind strong, it smelt like a giant barbecue but later became indistinguishable from the regular summertime whiff of torched sulphur that rises out of the Albufera swamp.

The other fire, in fact between Son Serra and Petra, was altogether more serious, if not on an Ibiza scale. The boys in green are taking rather more interest in this than might normally be the case, as the fire was on finca land belonging to the chief prosecutor for the Balearics. All three fires seemed to have been started either by accidental negligence (believed to be the case in Ibiza) or deliberately.

Mallorca does burn, but rarely dramatically. The Ibiza fire is the most significant on all the islands since 2006. Each year there are minor fires, such as those on the Sant Marti mountain in Alcúdia, invariably the result of a discarded cigarette but little more than a spectator sport for those watching the water bombers.

A campaign was launched last year, usefully of course only in Catalan. You will still see the posters around - "ni 1 foc al bosc" (not one fire in the forest). It was intended as a reminder following the loss of 23 hectares of Balearics woodland to fire in 2008: the Ibiza one alone has affected 400 hectares, the Son Serra fire, 140 hectares, not all woodland, but the two fires show the scale of what have been abnormal events.

There are dense woodlands on Mallorca, but the island is not a Corsica, which is essentially thick forest on high mountains surrounded by flat plains of coast, some within furnace distance of forest. I was once caught up in a Corsica fire. The island burnt a treat, and the police were hunting a German "pyromaniac"; Corsica used to attract some strange fire-starting, lunatic tourists. But what Mallorca does have in common is the mistral (mestral in Catalan) and other winds; it is the mistral that tends to cause as much havoc as the fires themselves in Corsica and southern France.

One other difference is that the Canadair pilots do not have hero status in Mallorca as they do in Corsica. I watched the plane fly into the smoke of Albufera and then lost sight of it for a while. Only when it suddenly roared over within touching distance was I sure it was going back for more water. In Corsica, pilots sometimes don't come back. The fires there are an entirely different beast, the planes diving into valleys of thick smoke, pilots flying blind; it's trees or cables that normally cause them to crash.

The fires of the Balearics have been serious, but rarely, if ever, will they be truly catastrophic in a Corsican style, even if the Ibiza one is being described as a "natural disaster". Not one fire in the forest. There have been three - in so many days. That's bad enough.


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