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La Palma volcano land registered and now belongs to Spanish state
The 2021 volcanic eruption has forever changed the landscape of the Spanish island
On September 19, 2021, the earth under La Palma shook and millions of cubic metres of magma gushed from the western slope of the Cumbre Vieja. The eruption of Tajogaite, as it has been named, lasted until December 13. Eighty-five days in which the lava boiled through more than 1,200 hectares of land and buried around 3,000 public and private buildings.
A year after the disaster, while the displaced residents of municipalities like El Paso, La Laguna and the now-disappeared Todoque were still trying to rebuild their lives, the island had already started to assimilate the hardened magma and extend its coasts out over the sea.The lava reached the sea ten days after the start of the eruption, forming a large delta in which new beaches quickly began to form. Moreover, the lava conduits that advanced along the island platform and the slope of the island during the eruption occupied the pre-existing relief and filled three canyons between 40 and 400 metres deep.
But while the experts believe it could take anything up to a decade for this new land to fully stabilise, the Spanish state has already registered some 482,606 square metres of an agricultural plot which now officially forms part of La Palma’s coastline and even has its own cadastral reference in the Land Registry.Here, roads have been paved through the solidified lava and new subdivisions are already in place.
However, caution must continue to prevail in this area since just on the surface, gaps in the new deltas mean that the land is still relatively fragile and unstable, and erosion and landslides remain a strong possibility.
Images: Antonio Giraldo on Twitter
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