The gray spots on the white blanket of snow continue to remind us today that the small towns in the Sanabria area (Zamora) feared that the fires would enter their towns, surrounded by wild forests where there used to be farmland or plots cleared by cows. Depopulation means that there is more forest mass and that trees and bushes grow only a few meters from houses, thus increasing the risk that if they catch fire they will affect inhabited areas.
This risk has been key to the creation of Forgarero, a project to revalue forest assets in Galende, Requejo and Robleda-Cervantes (1,600 inhabitants between them). Their town councils have come together to encourage their neighbors, smallholders historically suspicious of communal matters, to give up their lands so that they can be managed judiciously and take advantage of their wood or resources and, in the process, mitigate the fires. The problem: general reluctance, fractional inheritances and closed minds.
The director of Forgarero, Olga González, sits at the Casa del Parque del Lago de Sanabria with the mayors Paco Rodríguez, (Robleda-Cervantes, independent), Santiago Cerviño, (Requejo, PP) and Miguel Ángel Martos (Galende, PP following a plan previously approved by the PSOE). Different colors in three nuclei with 19 districts but the same ideas where agricultural and social individualism has been of little use.
González, also head of the Federation of Forestry Associations of Castilla y León, explains that Forgarero, with funds from the Ministry of Ecological Transition, was born in 2023 to manage abandoned rural assets by collaborating with locals. “We are very individualistic, going from managing your farm to joint management is difficult to understand but we have to give confidence, generate the local economy and take advantage of the fact that the fires have raised awareness,” he highlights. First, they have prepared a state of the situation based on silvicultural reports, mapping of land use and forest masses and calculations on wooded areas to present to the Town Councils designs of security rings that surround the towns and that, if the flames appear, they cannot advance. The mayors also prepare ordinances to be able to intervene in abandoned land and send the bill to the owner, although in this they clash with divided inheritances. Now what we have to do is involve: 210 owners have already participated and 260 hectares have been transferred, a figure they want to increase.
And they are at it. Cerviño maintains that it “doesn’t cost the neighbors anything” and they will be able to benefit from the extraction of wood and the gain of pasture for livestock, in addition to the guarantees against fire. “It’s hard but people are becoming aware of it and they tell each other,” he adds, as in Robleda, whose mayor celebrates the good reception and explains its context: “In Sanabria, the heritage is very deep-rooted, we are reluctant to give up properties, but the forest eats us; they have to see that if there is a fire in the town, it is our fault.” Martos comments that there is a great generational difference between young people, which in these areas includes people over 50 years old, and veterans: “Some prepare for the World Cup on the fringes and others pass by.” Everyone trusts in observation and that the countrymen, seeing that the neighbor has the plot taken care of and makes a profit, decides to imitate him and expand the scope of the plan. The bad thing is that if many participate and some do not, those soils will be ravaged and if there are flames the work will be of little use. Morán exemplifies: “We are like Saint Thomas, we have to put our finger on the wound and see it.”
A Citroën C15, the official rural car, chugs towards Vigo de Sanabria (140 inhabitants), where among the forgotten houses, street streams and raised pavements there are, literally, forests. The consultant David Pedrero, 36 years old, and key to local pedagogy, teleworks there. He regrets that the mayor does not work very hard and that the people lack a “social leader” to inform them about this project. “Convincing is complicated, I say it in the town chats, they have to understand it without strange words and make them see that it works elsewhere and that no one has gone too far with the land,” he argues, again with the generation gap: the young people share it and the older ones comply “even if they have the farm dying of laughter.”
In Robleda (80 inhabitants) the rancher Manuel Ramos, 60, greets at the bar, with a framed photo from decades ago, when there were crops and not oaks and oaks. “It’s essential! The towns are closing, we can no longer go to clear the forest or take advantage of it for the livestock,” he reproaches, with jungles ideal for wolves. The man censures that his neighbors preserve “our parents’ farms” but do not optimize them and, by abandoning them, turn them into risks for everyone. Olga González agrees: “You are leaving a problem for your children.” Ramos, on the land where his cows chew their cud, points to an indeterminate point among the undergrowth, with a dense, dark forest: “When I was 20 years old, Cervantes could be seen from Robleda. Now nothing.”
