Inland from the coast, a fire and a refusal to leave

The smoke column rose above the ridge at 3:15 on Tuesday afternoon, visible from the coastal highway 12 kilometres away. By evening, the wildfire had crossed the dry creek bed below El Cedro and was pushing through secondary scrub toward the village's southern edge.

Firefighters from the Costa Mar Civil Protection Corps evacuated 80 residents by bus to a shelter in the town of San Ramón. But at least a dozen people refused to leave — among them Ana Lucía Herrera, 67, who has lived in El Cedro since she was a child.

"I left once, in '98, and when I came back the house had been stripped," Herrera said, standing in her yard with a garden hose trained on the dry grass along her fence line. "The fire took the forest, but the people took what was inside. I'm not leaving it again."

The refusal to evacuate has complicated the firefighting effort. Civil Protection crews must now maintain a presence at the village perimeter to monitor the holdouts, even as the main fire line shifts north toward unpopulated forest.