The Cumbre Vieja eruption began on September 19 and ended on December 25, after 10 days without activity.
The first evacuees to return to their homes after the eruption of the volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands, saw their joy mitigated when they saw what awaited them: a sea of volcanic sand that covers houses and landscape.
“It’s a whole plain” of volcanic ash, “it’s another world,” complained Félix Rodríguez, a 61-year-old bricklayer, as he swept the sand off his roof, only to throw it on the terrace.
Rodríguez is one of 1,000 evacuees out of the 7,000 who were allowed to return home this week, but like many others, he will not be able to immediately settle there.
To the ash, which obstructs doors and roads, is added the lack of water and the destruction of a road in the Aridane valley that makes people have to circumvent the entire island – almost two hours of road – to carry out daily commutes that used to take five minutes.
Rodríguez’s house was miraculously saved, but the wash destroyed a nearby cemetery from which now only a few tall niches stand out.
“Those never bothered me,” he says, pointing to the deceased, for whom he prayed in vain that the lava would not give them more burial.
As a gift from the Magi
The Cumbre Vieja eruption began on September 19 and ended on December 25, after 10 days without activity; In that time, the lava destroyed more than 1,300 homes and 1,250 hectares of land, many of them cultivated with bananas, avocados, and vines.
Carmen Acosta, 57, was one of the few who could go home to sleep on Monday, for the first time, after three and a half months in a hotel, and she felt happy as “on Three Kings Day.”
His house is very simple and representative of the area: one-story, brightly colored walls – blue – with an orchard, vineyards that climb the porch and views that are lost in the Atlantic Ocean.
His parents, octogenarians, live with Acosta, very tired from the traffic, surrounded by the bags of clothes, food and medicines that they brought from the hotel.
“We still have a lot to clean, this will not go away in six months, a lot of ash, a lot of garbage … Horrible, this is horrible,” he confesses.
Black as a graveyard
The height of the ash covers the trunks of many fruit trees and their tops resemble shrubs, from which hang tangerines, oranges and apples that brush the ground.
Gladys Jerónimo, a 65-year-old housekeeper recently retired, remembers, while sweeping and tidying the plants on her front porch, that she had the illusion of a life of contemplation.
“I thought ‘I hope to enjoy a few years’, but for now that’s what it is: sadness, and cleaning and cleaning,” he laments.
Jerónimo feels “a lot of joy and helplessness at the same time: joy because it is finished, but helplessness to see that we cannot return” definitely due to lack of water.
Her neighbor, María Zobeida Pérez Cabrera, a 68-year-old nursing assistant who is also retired, describes her impression upon returning to what was her parents’ home, now their second home.
“Horrifying, like a cemetery. Everything you saw around was black, everything, there was no floor, no roof, and the plants were black ”, says Pérez Cabrera, energetically loading and pushing wheelbarrows of ash that dump into a pile a few meters from the house.
Faced with the task that awaits her husband and her, they find consolation in an idea: “the theory that we have, [es que] what we take away today is not there tomorrow ”.
Goodbye show, hello reality
Jorge Díaz Hernández is a 36-year-old farmer who has been taking care of a family banana farm for more than 10 years.
He is one of the thousands of evacuees with no return date: it is “the great million dollar question, I don’t know,” he replies, shrugging.
He speaks from the top of Las Rosas mountain, in Los Llanos de Aridane, a privileged point to observe the evolution of the eruption, to which he often climbed to guess if his farm was still standing.
The property was intact, but he estimates it would take three years to get back to productivity and he’s fed up.
“I’m getting off the boat now, I’m going to dedicate myself to something else,” says Díaz. “I was already burned out of the deal with agriculture, with bananas, prices, water costs and all that. It’s like the last straw “.
“The volcano was a show within the drama, you had something. And now it is over, the cloud is over, we were in a cloud and now we are in reality, “he laments. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
