CAPILLA DEL MONTE, Argentina (Reuters) – Wildfires have burned through 40,000 hectares (400 square kilometers) of Argentina’s central farming region of Cordoba, according to officials, leaving charred cattle, houses, forests and fields in their wake.
Images from the hard-hit town of Capilla del Monte in the key ranching region showed cows completely burned and blackened amid scenes of decimated plants and trees. Locals described the sound of the blazes as like a “monster”.
“It was a sound like a turbine, like a growl, it sounded like a monster, literally. And we escaped. We escaped from something that was coming to eat us,” said Hugo Ávila, a 50-year-old artist, who fled his home as the fire approached.
“We fled down the road, with the car, with my dogs and with the neighbors. And 15 minutes later I came back and this was it. Everything was on fire, a house reduced to nothing.”
Argentina’s President Javier Milei is scheduled to travel to the region on Wednesday, hours after his return from a trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Firefighters are trying to put out the blazes using water tanker planes and helicopters to prevent them from spreading to urban areas, the province said. The fires have been exacerbated by hot weather and drought, which has caused record blazes this year more widely around South America from Bolivia to Brazil.
Benjamin Grandoli, a 34-year-old teacher and cattle farmer, said that 98% of his land had been burned. Some animals died while others were saved from the fire.
“There are 280 animals, including those that died … Right now they are in pens but they don’t have food, and water from the mountain is scarce due to the drought. So it’s complicated,” he said.
“The disaster and impact of the wildfires is astonishing.”
(Reporting by Luciano Gonzalez and Juan Bustamante; Writing by Eliana Raszewski; Editing by Lucila Sigal, Adam Jourdan and Aurora Ellis)
