In January 2021, a significant forest fire occurred in the Castala area of the Sierra de Gádor (https://www.almerinatura.com/espacios-naturales/sierra-de-gador). The flames devastated around 400 hectares of pine forest, oak groves, and scrubland. After five exhausting days of work, the fire, which threatened one of the province's major green lungs, was finally extinguished.

For many years, I had been keen on photographing a forest fire, and that year, unfortunately, it happened in a place that had been very special to me since childhood.

I began the photographic work feeling very disoriented during the first outings, and the state of the area drove me, rationally, to develop a more documentary style of photography with a hint of ecological protest. I didn't feel at all identified with those images and still couldn't find a more intimate photography amid so much ash and desolation.

Paradoxically, in the gloomy ugliness of the burned forest, I began to find myself as an author when I learned to seek the beauty in the disaster.