The Los Guájares fire is considered stabilized five days after it started

The fire that has been burning since last Thursday in Granada's Sierra de Los Guájares and in forest land in the municipalities of Albuñuelas, El Valle, El Pinar and Vélez de Benaudalla has been considered stabilized on Tuesday afternoon.

A stabilized fire, however, does not mean that it is controlled or extinguished, but rather that it is considered to be progressing favorably because it does not have new active fronts that allow the flames to advance freely.

As Ramón Fernández Pacheco, Minister of Sustainability, Environment and Blue Economy of the Junta de Andalucía, explained on the ground, "the fire is still alive and the perimeter still has to be secured", although no new areas are expected to burn.

🔴The advisor of @MedioAmbAND @RamonFPM announces the STABILIZATION of #IFLosGuájares after 6 days of intense work.

📍 390 troops and 11 heavy vehicles work on its control.

pic.twitter.com/QAlK7YLMNv

– INFOCA (@Plan_INFOCA) September 13, 2022

The counselor has defined the fire as "very complicated" mainly due to the orography, with very steep slopes, and the weather, with winds that have changed direction and intensity unexpectedly on many occasions.

Until this declaration, the fire has reached a perimeter of 62 kilometers that encloses in its interior something more than 5,000 hectares.

As explained by Fernández Pacheco, there are “green islands”, areas that have not been burned, inside the delimited area, which leads one to suppose that the burned surface is somewhat smaller in the end.

The counselor explained that there is still a lot of work ahead to control the fire first, "which will take us a few days", and to subsequently proceed to its complete extinction.

In short, the residents of nearby towns will still see smoke or flames in the coming days.

The fire started last Thursday at 1:55 p.m. in the Sierra de Los Guájares.

Some retired environmental agents were the first to come and were about to turn it off in the first few minutes.

However, as one of the Environment professionals investigating the origin of the fire explained to this newspaper, when they were about to extinguish it, the fire jumped into a gorse, a plant that burns very easily, and control was already lost there. .

From then until 125 hours later, the flames have been controlled some times and others out of control through one of the most important green areas in the province of Granada, with thousands of pines and trees.

As far as towns and their inhabitants are concerned, Monday afternoon was the most tense.

Ízbor and Acebuches, two towns in the municipality of Pinar, were confined by the Junta de Andalucía.

In practice, on the other hand, it happened that almost all of the more than 150 people who live in these rural areas abandoned them to spend the night with family or friends in other locations or, in some cases, in their vehicles far from the fire. .

15 people who lived in rural buildings have also been evicted and, in the absence of official accounting, it is assumed that some farmhouses and numerous agricultural estates have been burned.