Things to know if you want to come to Spain on holiday
Please don't come. Let me explain.
Spain is divided in 17 autonomous communities. Fourteen of them are in the right wing parties' hands, either the Popular Party (PP),the extreme right Vox, or a coalition or both.
The right doesn't believe in disaster management. This means that they are continuously shrinking every emergency plan budget, cancelling sustainability programs that could avoid natural disasters like fires or floodings and downsizing our firefighters, forest guards and technical pros numbers.
This is of course intentioned, not an unexpected result of the traditional right wing austerity. It's done on purpose so the right wing autonomic presidents can keep the money, hand the incident to the Emergency Military Unit (UME) and then, with the fire or whatever it is out of control because it was left alone for a critical time, they can blame the left wing central government for political profit.
They don't care for our lives, and that includes tourists' lives I'm sorry. You are not special, you are not protected, if anything tourists are even more vulnerable because they don't know the place and not a lot of people know where they are if they are camping or in an airbnb.
The climate crisis have brought very severe floodings and megafires to Spain, and the main point related to everything I've written above is that they have turned extremely fast. Like "you don't have time to get the dog" fast.
In the recent fire of the Gallardos the andalusian autonomous government didn't even sent a phone alert and decided that it was better that people warned each other. Of course if you are camping or even just a bit isolated and have a limited knowledge of the language you are in danger in this situation. This year's strong El Niño point towards a potential repeat of the tragic Valencia flooding of 2024, another huge mismanagement from a conservative autonomous president that costed him his presidency- but he's still a deputy with a big fat paycheck, and his succesor has, once again, downsized the emergency response budget.
I don't know what to tell you. If you plan to come to Spain anyway please take in account all this, because most of our political leaders are not going to do it for you.