In August, Miguel Medina Cabrera, a Spanish farmer on the island of Gran Canaria in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, watched the land around his farm start to burn.

“The fire was burning for four days, but afterward there were tree trunks that continued burning for fifteen days,” Cabrera told me. “It looked like lava pouring slowly from ten volcanoes. It was very painful to watch, but at the same time it was spectacularly beautiful.”

Cabrera has been putting out wildfires on this island since he was a boy. But he says the number of wildfires has increased noticeably since his youth, and this summer’s was by far one of the worst he has witnessed. That made it particularly frustrating when a far-right party in the Senate temporarily blocked a declaration of support for the victims of the fire, incensed because some senators asserted that the fires might have something to do with climate change.

Climate change is causing an increase in the number of heat waves and large forest fires in Spain, according to researchers from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Between August 17 and 20, around 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes as two simultaneous wildfires ravaged Gran Canaria, destroying around 25,000 acres of land. Around 90 percent of Gran Canaria is at risk of becoming a desert due to draught and deforestation, according to the Foundation for the Reforestation of the Canary Islands.

“It was like hell. Everything was burning,” Antonio, a local restaurant owner, told me, recalling the recent fire and motioning to the blackened mountains that surround his establishment.