As the worst wildfires in Spanish history tore through the country, Elena Sánchez paused from selling beers in a kiosk on the edge of an artificial lake in Madrid and pointed west toward the sunset. It was the wrong color.
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” Ms. Sánchez, 54, said on Sunday evening, looking at a hazy gray blush — the fire’s smoky residue — in the not-so-distant distance.
As fires raged 30 miles from Madrid in recent days, an acrid burning smell imbued all of this park on Madrid’s western edge, Ms. Sánchez said. Though the situation improved over the weekend, people initially stopped exercising for the itching in their throats, she said, and older residents wore surgical masks outdoors. She could still feel the smoke on her tongue, she said.
“It’s scary,” Ms. Sánchez said. “I’m afraid it might reach here.”
In recent years, wealthy expats, immigrant workers and global attention have made Madrid a booming European capital. But as the flames on Monday reached new areas around the capital and extended to more regions around the country, a suffocating reality check has also reached the city.
In a country led by a government that has defined itself by the seriousness with which it takes climate change, the flames have come unsettlingly close to the capital. The fires around Madrid have brought to tears the region’s president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Experts say they are a harbinger for the damage to come on the world’s fastest warming continent.
“These are difficult hours,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Monday afternoon during a news conference in Castellón, on Spain’s eastern coast, where a new fire raged and forced thousands of new evacuations.
In the face of what his government has called the largest fires in the country’s history, and after a summer of record-breaking heat waves, he called for a national pact with all Spain’s political parties to work together to prevent blazes that he attributed to climate change. “This climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned all of Spain and Europe about,” he said.
On Monday, regional authorities ordered the evacuation of Valdemaqueda, a town of about 870 people roughly 25 miles away from the Spanish capital, another sign that the wildfires west of Madrid were not fully under control. Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, said that firefighters had a “crucial” two-day window to control the fires around Madrid before extreme temperatures topping 100 Fahrenheit were expected to wallop the country.
All that has shaken Madrid’s residents, who can’t remember when such a large fire came so close to the city.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Leopoldo Salvador, 84, who walked under a statue of Don Quixote in the Plaza España, a central square in Madrid. He said he closed the windows of his house over the temperate weekend to keep the smoke out.
Near the city’s royal palace, Cristina Herrero, 46, a biology professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, listened on her phone to news about the fires. She and her friends walked by the palace gardens with sheep dogs that they had evacuated from their farms outside the city.
“I’m sorry,” Ms. Herrero called out to another dogwalker as her pack barked and growled at the unleashed dogs around them. “These are evacuated dogs!”
As the other dogwalker gave her a dirty look, she talked about the sheep and horses and beehives she had left behind in the farms outside the city. Ms. Herrero said that while the city still felt insulated and safe, those living just to the capital’s west were “very worried.”
Her friend Henar Hidalgo Riol, 60, who was also walking an evacuated dog, agreed.
“There are fires everywhere,” Ms. Hidalgo Riol said, adding that dry brush carpeted the mountains surrounding Madrid. “People know they’re sitting on a powder keg.”
Experts said the fires resulted partly from the loss of rural culture that had required forest management. Less grazing and less logging meant woods and landscapes throughout Spain, and in greater Madrid, were left untouched, a potentially explosive ingredient when combined with dry conditions that are made more likely by the burning of fossil fuels.
“Fires now find fuel everywhere,” said Víctor Resco, professor of forest engineering in the University of Lleida.
Outside the royal palace on Monday, Charo Fernández, 65, a lawyer, strolled toward a horizon that looked like a mountain range but was the faint silhouette of smoke from the fires to the west. She said her clothes reeked of smoke over the weekend, and that smoke had billowed from the west and toward the city as if “out of a chimney.”
Those signs of fire were like nothing Ms. Sánchez, who works at the kiosk by the lake, said she had ever seen. She said that Madrid’s weeks of record-breaking heat had already exhausted her, and that climate change seemed unstoppable. No matter what resources and legislation the country threw at the fires.
“It just keeps spreading,” she said, looking at the sullied sunset. “Just don’t let it reach here.”
Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.
