The Spanish villa we put years of love and labour into was consumed by wildfires in hours… but we’re the lucky ones

They named it Casa de los Suenos – House of Dreams – a three-bedroom farmhouse with a bar surrounded by olive and almond trees in the tiny rural hamlet of Fuente del Albarico, 230 miles east of Malaga in southern Spain.

For more than two years, Cameron and Sue Evans carved out an idyllic life here as expat retirees, hosting friends, getting to know the local community and walking their two beloved dogs in the stunning pine forests and rugged foothills of the Andalusian mountains.

But today, they tell me, their home looks ‘like a war film’.

With the surrounding landscape ‘blackened and smoking’ and little pockets of glowing ash still burning, their house of dreams has been razed almost to the ground by wildfire. 

The entertainment room with a bar where they’d spent many happy evenings with friends and family has been destroyed, as has the artwork they’d spent years collecting on their travels. The trees that framed the property are burnt to a crisp.

‘We put two-and-a-half years of labour and love into the house to make it our home, and it was just gone within 24 hours,’ says Cameron, 60.

Devastating as it is, a home can be rebuilt. Thirteen other people fleeing the inferno that also hit the nearby neighbourhood of Bedar in Almeria earlier this month – seven of them Britons – did not escape.

‘We’re the lucky ones,’ says Cameron, even as he surveys the charred remains of his home. 

Friends of friends are among the dead, including Annette Kilgour, 69, who was killed while trying to escape the blaze. 

She and her husband, Malcolm Timbrell, 70, had moved to the village of Bedar, below Fuente del Albarico, from Cornwall, finding their home on the TV show A Place In The Sun in 2022. Both had lost previous partners due to terminal illnesses.

Already this summer 300,000 people have been evacuated from the path of catastrophic wildfires across Europe, with at least 254,000 hectares of land burned.

Fuelled by a rolling series of extreme heatwaves and strong winds, fires in the Gironde region of France and west of Madrid in Spain have threatened scenic holiday locations and major urban centres, and are still burning. 

Both countries have declared national emergencies as a result and warned that extreme wildfire danger is likely to continue throughout August.

But the blaze that hit the Evanses on July 9 remains Europe’s deadliest this year.

At one point moving at about 300ft per minute, the fire rapidly burned across 17,000 acres, trapping people in hilly regions with few escape routes.

It began, remembers Cameron, with a seemingly innocuous ‘little puff of smoke’ on the horizon.

The couple moved to Spain in 2024 from Blackpool, where Cameron had worked as a maintenance engineer for Johnson & Johnson, and Sue, 69, worked in non-teaching roles at a school.

Early that Thursday evening, he and Sue watched the smoke for about ten minutes as it began rolling down the ridgeline of the hills a couple of miles away.

They weren’t overly worried – they had seen wildfires on the horizon before. Last year, friends, and then the authorities, had told them to evacuate the farmhouse while firefighters tackled another nearby wildfire. But on that occasion they were allowed back to the house after 24 hours.

Now they decided they would leave only if the wind changed direction – but that didn’t take long. Twenty minutes later, just before 6.30pm, the fire began to head towards them.

Grabbing a bag containing their passports, house deeds and insurance documents – and of course their dogs, English pointer Phoebe and cocker spaniel Molly – they drove down the hillside to Bedar, 20 minutes away, to join forces with a small group of fellow Britons from the area.

‘We were all stood at the car park, wondering what to do,’ says Cameron. At this stage they had received no alerts from the local authorities. 

But the situation was fast becoming perilous – just half an hour after reaching the village, ‘the wind had pushed the fire to the edge of Bedar’.

‘You could actually see the smoke getting thicker and thicker, and you could see flames on the top of the hill,’ says Cameron.

Anxiety rising, they decided to move again, and got back in their car to drive ten minutes down the twisty, semi-mountainous road to the next town, Los Gallardos. It was in the sports centre here that people had been told to gather in an emergency.

But now the fire was beginning to encircle them – and before they could reach Los Gallardos, flames had torn across the road and blocked their path. 

They tried a back road out, but ‘the fire was all around us’ and moving fast. ‘It was on the hillsides, you could see it coming quite close, within 50 or 100 metres,’ recalls Cameron.

Now he felt panic, realising that ploughing onwards would mean certain death and yet unsure whether the way back was also now engulfed by fire.

It was a white-knuckle journey as their small convoy of cars turned around and tried yet another route. Cameron remembers the horrifying thought that the car in front of them wasn’t going as quickly as they needed to in order to outrun the blaze. 

As the fire sped through bone-dry vegetation, with no breaks or obstacles, it was moving significantly faster than the average wildfire. Driving past, hearts in their mouths, the fleeing Britons could see it spark and flare in the undergrowth.

Eventually, mercifully, they made it out of danger, across the baking foothills to the tiny town of Lubrin nine miles away.

Here the Red Cross was giving out emergency supplies, and they were at least safe from the flames.

Hoping the fire would be contained once the sun was up, Cameron and Sue parked nearby and tried to get some sleep in their car. The next morning, however, they were told the entire area was still a danger zone. Fears for their house began to mount.

Meanwhile, unbeknown to them at this point, Annette Kilgour had already perished in the Bedar fire. Initially both she and her husband Malcolm had fled their house in the village, but Malcolm had decided to return to rescue their two cats, Charlie and Lilly.

Attempting to catch up with Annette and a group of other neighbours, he found himself outpaced by the fire with no option but to shelter in a car, which – by an extraordinary twist of fate – escaped the blaze while others around it burst into flames.

Meanwhile, Annette and six others were confronted by a wall of fire and killed.

With the help of friends, the Evanses now found somewhere to stay an hour’s drive away, but even from there ‘we could smell the fire – in fact we could see it in the hills. There was ash falling everywhere and smoke in the air’.

The area they had fallen so deeply in love with less than three years before had turned on them with a ferocious power.

It was on a trip around Europe to mark Sue’s retirement that they decided to follow their dream and move to Spain. 

While visiting Sue’s daughter in Murcia in the south of the country, their camper van broke down and they ended up staying for six weeks. Shortly after, they began to plan their own Spanish idyll.

‘Sue had lost her mother the year before and wanted a change, a challenge,’ says Cameron of his partner of more than 30 years.

The third place they looked at – a rural home, parts of which dated back 250 years and built into the hillside – was the clincher. ‘Sue looked at it, and said, ‘Right, I want to move here.’

‘It’s not an easy life, living so rurally. Sometimes you have water, sometimes you don’t, or the electricity goes off.’

Indeed, last year they had no water for three months.

Yet ‘it is a beautiful, beautiful place, and it’s so peaceful,’ says Cameron. ‘It’s good for the mental health, it’s relaxing.

‘And the people in the area, the villagers, once they get to know you, are very friendly.’

Of course that tranquillity has been utterly shattered for now.

It’s not known how many homes were destroyed in the July 9 fire, but the village of Bedar now looks like the surface of the moon, a sea of black ash deposited over its gently rolling hills with just the occasional villa left intact among the devastation.

Instead of a summer spent at social events across the neighbouring villages, the calendar has been filled with funerals.

Not that the Evanses knew what they would return to, when the area was considered safe enough to visit a week after the fire.

As they drove towards the village, their mood was positive as they ‘chatted away’ – but once what was left of their home came into view ‘we went quiet and then were both in tears’.

Seeing the wreckage was ‘unbelievable’ says Cameron, who even now is overcome with emotion.

‘You’re bewildered. It’s like: where’s it all gone?’

The farmhouse was burned almost entirely, yet the randomness of the fire’s path meant some neighbouring properties were completely untouched.

Others had survived either because they were built on higher ground or had large boulder-strewn terraces where nothing could grow or burn.

Mercifully, a cubbyhole under their stairwell has kept the Evans’ family photos safe. But ‘the house itself was the most sentimental thing for us, as it was a new start in a new country in a beautiful place’ – and that was gone.

Given the scale of the damage and the rebuilding project, they are unlikely to be back in their home for at least six months, probably more.

The situation, they say, is simply ‘heart-breaking’.

Now many in the community are questioning the actions of the authorities in the midst of the crisis. Amid conflicting reports, the Belgian son of one of the fire’s victims has issued an open call for information to construct an accurate account and timeline of the Bedar blaze.

Residents say that no official warnings were given about the fire, while the authorities maintain otherwise. Legal proceedings are now under way.

UK-based Danielle Gillam-Kirton, whose parents both perished in the fire, is supporting the call, writing on social media: ‘We implore anyone that has information to help us get answers… anyone that knows my parents knows that they would always stand up for what is right and just, I would be doing them a disservice if I did not do the same.’

Cameron and Sue have begun planning how they could survive another catastrophe. They have discussed building a fire barrier around the perimeter of the property, and permanently keeping an emergency bag filled with documents, non-perishable supplies and clothes so that they are equipped should the worst happen again.

Several weeks on and the shock is yet to leave them.

‘One minute you’re crying, the next minute you’re angry and the next minute you try to laugh it off – typical British sensibilities,’ explains Cameron.

Astonishingly, in spite of everything, he believes that moving to Spain remains ‘the best thing we ever did’.

In normal times, nothing can beat the sense of peace the couple found there. That’s why, despite what has happened – despite their children (and 14 grandchildren) urging them to come back to the UK – they have decided to stay.

‘We still love it and we still want to live here,’ they say.

The hope has to be that human ingenuity can find ways to defend life and property from the ever-increasing threat posed by fire in a changing climate. 

But as parts of the continent still remain at the mercy of some of the largest wildfires ever seen in Europe, the battle this year is far from won.