Fires in Chile: tragedy, resilience and miracle in the Viña del Mar Botanical Garden

Friday afternoon several hundred people I wandered the idyllic gardens of the National Botanical Garden of Chilein Viña del Mar, mostly unaware that, just beyond some hills and a road, a raging forest fire was galloping toward them.

The danger soon became apparent. The rangers began racing around the park on motorcycles, yelling at visitors to flee for the exits. But when many of them arrived, the fire had already arrived.

“Thick black smoke rose above us, so we lay down on the grass just inside the gate,” Alejandro Peirano, park director, recalled Monday morning. “One of my rangers turned to me and said, ‘Director, are we going to die?’ “

Elsewhere, three other rangers were trying to rescue a colleague, Patricia Araya, 60, a greenhouse manager who lived in the park and cared for her two grandchildren and her 92-year-old mother. They reached the door of their cabin, but the fire was getting closer. “I could feel the heat burning my back. “I realized that they were pieces of burning bark that fell on me.”Freddy Sánchez, 50, said Monday, standing guard at the park’s entrance.

“We had to turn around,” he said. “All your body wants is to find a way out of the heat.”

The crowd on the front lawn survived, some kind of miracle, as 98% of the nearly 1,000-acre garden was destroyed.

Araya, her mother and her two grandchildren did not, making them four of the 122 confirmed deaths in one of the deadliest fires in modern history.

Authorities provided dogs for body detection on Monday They continued the search for bodies in the nearly 40 square kilometers burned due to fast-moving forest fires that occurred Friday in the province of Valparaíso, a popular tourist area near Chile’s central coast.

They also took stock of the broader destruction, including some 15,000 homes and one of Chile’s national jewels: the National Botanical Garden of Viña del Mar, founded 107 years ago.

A unique place

The botanical garden, which spans 1.5 square miles, It is one of the largest in the world and it is also a crucial research and conservation center for the region. For decades, the staff has built and studied a diverse garden, with more than 1,000 species of trees, including some of the rarest in the world.

Due to Chile’s isolated geography, located between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, the country is home to many endemic plant species, meaning they are found nowhere else in nature.

The garden has played a decisive role in the conservation of those species, including many rare cacti. It also features medicinal plants, exotic plants from Europe and Asia, a large collection of species from the remote Juan Fernández Islands in the Pacific, and some of the world’s last known Sophora toromiro trees, native to Rapa Nui, or Easter. Island. , but they are now extinct in the wild.

“It’s a horrible loss. Years and years of research that many people have done in that garden, cultivating special collections,” said Noelia Álvarez de Román, Latin America specialist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a global network of botanical gardens.

Peirano said the park has been damaged by fires in the past, including in 2013 and 2022, with about a quarter of the land burned. “We are used to it.“ We patrol the most sensitive areas every day, clean the areas and educate people, ”he said.

“But this fire was completely unexpected”, He added. “We have never seen anything on this scale.”

Peirano stressed that the lives lost were far more devastating than the physical damage. Araya had worked at the park for about 40 years and this week she and her longtime partner had planned to have a new wedding ceremony and then go on vacation together, Peirano said in a television interview.

She had already taken time off from work Friday and her grandchildren, ages 1 and 9, came to stay with her the same day, she said.

Intentional

Authorities reiterated on Monday that they believe the fires had occurred They were intentionally provoked.

Rodrigo Mundaca, governor of Valparaíso province, told reporters that authorities have determined that at least one large fire broke out around 2pm on Friday in four different locations, within a few meters of each other.

“It seems to me that this could be spontaneous, natural? NO”he said, adding that national forestry workers had intentionally put out the fires the day before. “That’s why I say today that there is a clear intention and we hope that the authorities can find those responsible.”

Two people were arrested on Sunday on suspicion of trying to set fires near the botanical garden, but were later released because police said they had insufficient evidence. Authorities said they will maintain a nighttime curfew as investigations and recovery from the fires continue.

High temperatures and dry conditions before the fires created dangerous conditions in Chile. The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has contributed to heat and drought in parts of South America, and global climate change has also increased temperatures.

Strong winds on Friday caused the fires to spread rapidly, surprising authorities and leaving many people trapped as they tried to escape hillside settlements. On Monday, Firefighters largely contained the fire.

In the botanical garden, smoke from burned eucalyptus forests still hung in the air, as workers carved up fallen trees with chainsaws and helicopters carrying huge buckets of water flew overhead. Peirano was clearly saddened and called the charred gardens behind him “a treasure for Chileans.” but he was also determined to ensure that the forest grew back.

“Native plants will flower again, but we will need rain, and we won’t get it until May,” he said. He added that some of the garden’s exotic species have also survived the inferno, such as the historic 150-year-old banyan tree in Lahaina, Hawaii, which began sprouting leaves just weeks after a fire destroyed much of the town. .

Some of the surviving plants it included some of the nearly extinct trees Sophora toromiro, as well as the Ginkgo biloba trees of the park’s “Garden of Peace”, composed of plants that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan.

“They had the strength to start again after Hiroshima,” he said in a television interview Monday. “Now they will have double their strength if they pass this stage, because the fire has passed through them. The trees and what they represent will be twice as strong.”

The New York Times