Twenty One years and one week after "the Great Fire of Mijas", we had a repeat - only the press generally missed the point that it was Mijas Mountain" that took the hit, not Mijas Pueblo.
The photograph (thanks to Infoca firefighters in more ways than one), shows the area of the fire (red surround) whilst our little nest is the blue dot at the base of the southern slopes. It started on Friday lunchtime and, to date, has covered a couple of thousand hectares (no, nor me, but think about 30 golf courses joined together).
On Saturday last, they were frightened that the blaze might come over the mountain, or even spread along the southern slopes from the west. Frightened enough to close the road we live on (basically the line between the fire extremities, which is probably about 10 miles) and gave us a warning that we might have to leave at any time and at very short notice. We were all pretty edgy anyway, as the helicopters were a constant stream between the fire and the golf course ponds and the sea. I think they had about 18 aircraft at one time, plus a couple of dozen fire-engines and two or three hundred firefighters. They had already evacuated nearly three thousand people in the two Al Haurins and all points in between, so it was in everyones minds that running could be the next step.
G and I have had a "Contingency Plan"(hope you weren´t surprised by that) taped behind a kitchen cabinet door since the last big fire, so we duly moved all the patio furniture away from the house, disconnected the gas, closed all the windows and doors, tucked all the curtains away from the windows - then filled the car with pillows, water, washing kits, spare clothes etc, etc - not forgetting everything from the safe. (Oh, and the external hard drive from the Mac) - and finally remembering to turn off the pool pump.
All (3 other houses) of neighbours had been alerted and were ready, but there was no way of getting any genuine news on the state of the fire. I had re-registered on Twitter to get the infoca, local police and local news feeds, but it was all out of date by the time it was posted. The local police manning the road block knew sod-all either, just saying "no new information". (*remembering Oman in the Gulf War, genuine information is like gold, but rumours proliferate and obscure almost everything).
I whizzed down to the Niño, to hear that no one knew anything new, other than that Juan was still at his house (3km west of ours) hosing down the house and trees in his plot.
Another fruitless update from the police as I returned past them (and of course they didn´t say anything about where to evacuate to if we had to leave, so nothing has changed in 21 years). Anyway, and in the absence of any concrete news, we decided to go to the Niño (where I had a reservation for 4 anyway) and get something to eat - so G and I went with our new Danish neighbours and met our other friends. After about an hour Juan turned up too and said there were no blazes on our side of the mountain and that it hadn´t spread around the "end" of the range - so we all felt a little better.
Refreshed in many ways, we went home and told the neighbours to stand down from immediate flight level, but to remain vaguely alert for anyone coming to contact us. And so to bed for an uneasy night.
Sunday was the same constant stream of aircraft, but by mid-afternoon they re-opened the road - so we unloaded the car!
Experience says it will take them a couple of weeks to finally kill all the little hotspots, but hopefully everything will be ok.
The bonus points are that the contingency plan works and all the neighbours have actually met each other - despite the (very suspicious) German neighbour telling me that a robber had been to his house to tell him he might have to leave. That "robber" turned out to be our new heavily tattooed neighbour who had been the one who had been told to prepare to leave by the policeas he came home!
* One nice thing to come out of it all was the number of telephone calls and emails from friends asking if we were ok. Obviously, and after 22 years, we have become synonymous with Mijas in many people´s minds. Thanks everyone for your concern!
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