Fire and Water

There are currently over 65 forest and rural land fires burning throughout the region of Spain where we live (Galicia). Several of these fires have gotten very out of control and are damaging a lot of property and causing massive amounts of smoke to linger over the region. What is even stranger is that many of these fires were started on purpose! Per CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/08/08/spain.fires.ap/index.html), some people have been starting these fires to deliberately clear away trees from land in an attempt to get the zoning changed. Sheesh!

So, needless to say, the past few days have been very smokey around here. I had to wake up this morning and close all of the windows because of the amount of smoke getting into our apartment.

Anyhow, today I went to watch the tall ships sail away from La Coruña. From my spot on the rocks by the coast I could see a huge plume of smoke and a gray cloud rising up near the coast of Ferrol, just across the bay from La Coruña.

I sat down on these rocks :)


Cloud of smoke


The dark smoke cloud stretched for miles and miles. (Don't worry about us though! We live in a very residential neighborhood - in a concrete building surrounded by other concrete buildings.)



The ships all came out of the port one at a time - sails down. After all of the ships were out of the port they put their sails up - one boat at a time - and sailed around the Tower of Hercules and off to the horizon.

There are ships down in the lower left of the picture - hard to see at this size though...


These ships were really awesome. Some were small and some were huge. One looked like a cruise ship with sails - seriously. There were some that looked like pirate ships (old) and some that were very clean and new.



It was very fun to see these ships - it's just not something you get to do every day :)