Controlled burns in Cantabria, Spain: how a ban fuels the flames

Cantabria is paying a high price for demonising controlled burns

The Pasiego landscapes, those green mosaics that form the postcard image of Cantabria, are not the work of nature but of centuries of human management. Every spring, livestock farmers burned small patches of scrub to renew pastures and create natural firebreaks. But that culture of controlled fire, passed down through generations, was incivil from the 1980s onwards. The result, as defenders of the practice argue, is an unsustainable build-up of biomass that turns any spark into a megafire.

An arrest that exposes the hypocrisy

While the authorities were accusing livestock farmers of setting the mountains alight, the head of the Civil Protection volunteer unit (a Spanish emergency volunteer corps) in Ramales was arrested as the suspected perpetrator of a major wildfire. The news spread like wildfire through the gossip mills: the man in charge of putting out fires, burning the hills. Far from being an exception, defenders of controlled burning point out that the system creates its own institutional pyromaniacs: officials who need to justify their budgets. "If you pour money into solving X, people end up living off X never being solved," they sum up.

Scrub overgrowth as a ticking time bomb

The ban on traditional burning, combined with rural depopulation and an ageing countryside, has driven an accumulation of dry scrub. The mountains become impassable, and wildlife — wild boar included — seeks refuge in coastal housing estates. Defenders of controlled burning propose a simple, cheap system: burning in hexagonal cells, starting in the highest areas and letting the fire descend in a controlled manner. It would be carried out by local volunteers, at no cost to the public purse apart from the control equipment. "The authorities would only have to do the planning work, and at a very low cost," they insist.

A past no one wants to remember

Before the disentailments (the 19th-century privatisation of common lands in Spain), communal woodlands were managed in open village assemblies, and every neighbour looked after their own. Party rule — the system of closed party lists — put an end to that direct governance. Today, village councils are infiltrated by political parties, and the voice of the locals is lost. "When the woodland is partly yours, nobody sets fire to it recklessly," they conclude. The argument is simple: local ownership and management reduce the risk of fire.

The startling fact: France and Germany, which used to look down on Spain, now suffer every summer fires that were once rare. In Cantabria and Asturias, by contrast, fire remains a winter phenomenon, linked to illegal burning. Who would have thought the solution to the problem lies in what already used to work. The authorities, bent on banning, have achieved the opposite: bigger fires and a degrading landscape.