The volcanic event that started on 19 September 2021 on the Canary Island in La Palma was what you could say was a slow burner. No devastating explosions, no white-blooded boulders hurled miles into the sky, no pyroclastic flows of pumice and superheated gas hurtling murderously downhill. After a week of significant earthquakes, lava erupted from fissures along the Cumbre Vieja ridge. From the settlements far below, it seemed relatively benign at first, no more menacing than a few large Roman candles, but the flow never stopped, swelling over the following days and weeks into an undisturbed flatness, slo-mo of molten rock. to roll down to the west coast of La Palma.
About 7,000 residents, nearly a 10th of the island’s population, were evacuated as they watched anxiously from distant hills or on television drone footage as the burning tide claimed their homes and livelihoods. Swimming pools surrendered in furious clouds of steam and sulphur. A church tower sank into the lava. Banana plantations – the economic cornerstone of an island where tourism has always been a supporting act – were torched and buried in alarming numbers. At its peak, the flow was more than two miles wide and nearly four miles long. It steamrolled over the coastal highway and hit the Atlantic with an apocalyptic hiss.
When the eruption ended, 85 traumatic days later, the destruction catalog listed 1,345 homes, 16 schools and more than 100 business premises. Fifty miles of roads were buried, and a large amount of agricultural land was lost, including nearly a quarter of the island’s banana plantations. Total damage is estimated at £760 million, with only half of the properties affected thought to be fully insured. Due to the progress of the lava and the hasty evacuation, the only person who died was an elderly man who was overcome by poisonous gases while sweeping ash from his roof.
The eruption changed La Palma in the most fundamental way, redrawing its coast as the lava pushed out into the sea and created two new peninsulas. Above the original base, a new volcanic cone, 300 meters high, has been added to the island’s skyline. Surveying the aftermath between these two extremes, the locals can hardly imagine a hopeful future. From mountain to sea, the eruption left a crescent of coal-black geological debris behind, 3,000 acres of abandoned land. In some areas, the lava is more than 200 feet deep, and could be releasing heat and noxious gases for years to come.
Settlements that were on the edge of the game were captured when the flows stopped in a haunted and surreal purgatory, some buildings were destroyed, some miraculously, others almost half carefully filled with cindered rocks, a work of vengeful but precise theology. The contrast between the lifeless stillness of these scenes and the raging, primal forces that created them is almost too great to make sense of. We see a battlefield one morning after another, an environmentalist thought he had gotten out of his rage and burned the place to the ground. Las Manchas cemetery looks less like an ambitious installation of contemporary art at Las Manchas cemetery, where marble vaults hold a satanic slag heap. Death After Death.
With flights disrupted for months, tourist numbers fell by a third in the year after the eruption, and the damage to 270 foreign-owned holiday homes is unlikely to attract a lucrative new wave of semi-resident ex-pats. However, almost three years later, literal and figurative green shoots are going through that dead black landscape. Plants and shrubs emerge from the ash, and on the edge of the lava field, the Canary Islands pine is actually growing. This endemic conifer has pinecones covered in resin that melts in the heat of a fire and releases seeds. And it turns out that for a certain type of foreign visitor — the growing cohort of vacationers with a taste for wacky Instagram selfies — there’s nothing quite like a scorched foreign desert.
When Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in 2010, causing air traffic chaos around the world, local tourism authorities feared the worst. But instead of discouraging visitors, the eruption put Iceland squarely on the holiday map, sparking a tourism boom that transformed the national economy. For further proof that there’s money in magma these days, La Palma need only look over its shoulder to the nearby island of Tenerife, where the Teide National Park beckons, a bleak but formidable wilderness set around one of the largest volcanoes in the world. three million visitors per year.
And so La Palma, long considered the most obscure of the Canary Islands, is slowly rising from its ashes, beckoning vacationers to take a beating as they lay out their towels on the world’s newest beach, no matter how bumpy. This is probably not the time to consider the inevitability of further eruptions in this volcanically active island chain: this Cumbre Vieja episode was the seventh recorded on La Palma since 1470. Simple statistics tell us that it could there is a 50 percent chance. another eruption in the next five decades. No one wants to consider the more controversial scientific speculation that La Palma is the most likely source on the Canary Island of a massive volcano-triggered landslide – which could send a 300ft tsunami across the Atlantic.