The myth of traditional woodland management: when poverty kept wildfires at bay

There was no golden age of forestry: woods burned less because poverty had stripped them bare

The idea that shepherds and peasants once managed the land with ancestral wisdom and that this is why there were no great wildfires is an urban legend with little basis in reality. Historical and economic data dismantle it: in 949, a fire razed between 200,000 and 500,000 hectares on the Northern Plateau of Spain, a corridor of some 200 kilometres between León, Castile and the Caliphate. It was not divine punishment, but probably a burn linked to a raid in 948 that depopulated the area. Today, the story of "sustainable management" is used to justify clearing and logging policies, when the reality is quite different.

Poverty, not wisdom: why fires did not spread in the past

In the past, human activity was intensive and extractive. Transhumance moved millions of sheep that grazed the land down to the last blade of grass; every branch was cut for firewood, every cultivable inch was ploughed. The woodland was stripped bare, not managed. As the analyses point out, with fuel so scarce and discontinuous, fires stayed on the surface. It is not that there were fewer ignitions – everyone used fire daily – but that they had nowhere to run. The cause was not ecological but economic: extreme poverty and a lack of energy alternatives. Coal from the mines and firewood from the railway lines were the fuel for homes, and anything that could be scavenged was put to use.

Twenty-first-century rural abandonment: the real fuel of megafires

The problem today is not that wisdom has been lost, but that the economic model that kept the woodland clean out of necessity has broken down. The Madoz disentailment (1855), a Spanish law that privatised communal property, sold off a third of common lands; the Franco dictatorship pushed six million people into the cities; and the later development boom emptied the villages even further. With no one herding, felling or gathering, forest mass has exploded. That fuel continuity, combined with climate change, turns any ignition into a potential megafire. Current management, based on forestry subsidies and controlled burns, clashes with the reality of a countryside without labour and with land titles so fragmented that profitability is impossible.

The return to the countryside: utopia or economic necessity

Some argue that the solution is to repopulate rural Spain, but the numbers do not add up. Agricultural income is low, holdings are small and the bureaucracy is suffocating. Moreover, the discourse that incivil livestock farmers and farmers as "predators" clashes with the evidence that for centuries they were the main human firebreak. Predicting a mass return to the countryside is a gamble: as long as the urban economy offers better incomes and services, emptied Spain will remain empty. And the fires, as a result, will keep growing ever larger.

The sarracena is uncomfortable: there was no golden age of forestry. There was poverty. And the price of prosperity is woodland that burns with more virulence than ever. Anyone looking for simple solutions or easy scapegoats should first look at the economy.