How a volcano prepared Tenerife to fight wildfires
Isabel Hernández Díaz is used to looking out the window of her stone house in La Florida and seeing a panoply of avocado and chestnut trees, flowering laurel, and dense pine forest.
Higher up on the hill, toward the Teide volcano, she and her husband harvested honey in stacks of 30-odd wooden bee blocks.
Now, it’s all turned to dust, after 10 days of wildfires tore through the hillsides of Tenerife, in what were the worst to ever strike the Spanish Canary Islands.
“All this nature that was destroyed ... it’s awful,” says Ms. Hernández Díaz, wiping tears off her cheeks. She flips on her phone through photos she took before she and her family were evacuated to her sister’s and mother’s homes for a week. “But luckily, we’re OK, and we’ve been able to
