El Bosque Encarnado
Forest Fire: Aftermath
We (artists David Cass & Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar) produced this short film during 2014/2015. This was our first important collaboration. Literally translated, Encarnado suggests a flesh-red colour. El bosque: the forest (the Sierra Maria-Los Vélez Natural Park), its often hazardous Aleppo pines, covering most hillsides for miles around.
In our changing world, drought and inundation are both sides of the same coin. They come hand in hand with climate change. A warmer world means faster evaporation and irregularities in the ability of our atmosphere to hold and transport moisture. This means dry areas of the world become even drier, while wet areas get wetter. When rain does arrive to drought zones, it is increasingly likely to be torrential, in the form of a storm, causing flash flooding and stripping soil and nutrients from the land.
It was lightning from one such storm that set this patch of hillside alight; and it has been extremes in drought that have led to many of the recent forest fires we've seen around the world.
The burned patch of hillside pictured here had new brush and scrub poking up between blackened rocks by the time we arrived. What drew us to this patch of hillside was its colour: a vivid blood-red. The water and retardant poured from the air to halt the blaze contained this artificial pigment.
You realise, exploring the arid Almería landscape, that these patches of nightmarish forest are common. The region is bone-dry, and pines abundant: non-indigenous and mostly planted by man for hunting. Their roots absorb the scant subterranean moisture that should be going to crops, invading terrace systems and ruining age-old watering channels. Though, precipitation here is at an all-time low and so most of these channels no longer function.
Almería contains the closest thing to a full desert Europe has – it’s described officially as a semi-desert – and the rest of the region is becoming increasingly susceptible to the same fate. Drive around the region, between towns and villages and you’ll pass hundreds of abandoned houses: from simple dwellings to grand farmhouses with acres of land, they’re each now left to the elements. There’s nothing here to keep families on the land: wells and reservoirs have gone dry and episodes of drought have become ever more frequent since the middle of last century, rendering the land unworkable, uninhabitable, unsellable.
We spoke to locals – elderly residents of rural villages – and were told of the wet springs of their childhoods, of snow in winter, of green (pine free) hillsides. In half a century, life in this region has changed dramatically. Almería currently endures over 80% of the year without rain, or chance of rain (that’s in a non-drought year).
