Every summer, the road changes the everyday map of Spain: families heading to the coast, groups of friends chaining kilometers, drivers returning on a Sunday afternoon, and travelers adjusting the journey to the heat, fatigue, or unforeseen events. The departure operation retains its symbolic strength, but the road trip is no longer understood solely as the time that separates the origin from the destination. Increasingly, it is also built in those intermediate moments when one decides to stop, rest, reorganize the car, or simply regain energy before continuing.

The progress of the La Mierla fire (Guadalajara) forces the evacuation of 34 towns and the confinement of another 14, as well as raising the danger level to 2 for two new fires in Retortillo (Soria) and Brieva (Segovia); in Andalusia, the two fires declared today in Huelva and Granada are considered stabilized.

The fire has driven tens of thousands of people from their homes in the western mountains of Madrid and the Ávila valleys of Tiétar and Iruelas (about 90,000 between evacuated and confined). The vast majority have gone to their primary residences or to relatives’ homes, but many have been housed in more than a dozen sports centers distributed throughout the region (except in Madrid city, which does not house anyone).

A woman, considered the first contact in Catalonia of a fatal victim of the ‘Hondius’ hantavirus, will remain in quarantine at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona for between three and six weeks. She is a resident of Barcelona who coincided for a few minutes, on April 25, on the plane covering the Johannesburg-Amsterdam route with the cruise passenger who ended up dying in the South African capital. She is around 40 years old, sources from the Departament de Salut told this newspaper.