Lava pours out of the volcano on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands

September 22, 2021: -On Sunday, a volcano erupted on the Spanish Canary Island of La Palma, sending lava shooting into the air and streaming in rivers towards houses in two villages from the Cumbre Vieja national park in the south of the island.

The local authorities had started evacuating the infirm and some farm animals from nearby villages before the eruption at 3:15 p.m. on a wooded slope in the sparsely populated Cabeza de Vaca area islands’ government.

After two hours, with lava edging down the hillside from five fissures torn into the hillside, the municipality ordered the evacuation of four villages, which included El Paso and Los Llanos de Aridane.

After nightfall, video footage shows fountains of lava shooting hundreds of meters into the sky and almost three incandescent orange rivers of molten rock pouring down the hill, which tears gashes into woods and farmland and spreads as a spreading gas they reached the lower ground.

A few hundred meters long and tens of meters wide, one stream crossed a road and started engulfing scattered houses in El Paso. Video footage shared on social media, which Reuters cannot verify, showed the lava entering a home.

“When the volcano erupted today, I was scared. For journalists, it is something spectacular; for us, it is a tragedy. I think the lava has reached some relatives’ houses,” resident Isabel Fuentes, 55, told Spanish television TVE.

“I was five years old when the volcano erupted. You never get over a volcanic eruption,” added Fuentes, saying she had moved to another house on Sunday for her safety.   

On Sunday, Canary Islands President Angel Victor Torres told a press conference night that 5,000 people had evacuated and no injuries had been reported so far.

“It is not foreseeable that anyone else will have to be evacuated. The lava moves towards the coast, and the damage will be material. According to experts, there are already 17-20 million cubic meters of lava,” he added.

Flights to and from the Canaries were continuing as standard, the airport operator Aena said.

On Sunday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez came to La Palma, the most northwesterly island of the archipelago, to talk with the islands’ government on managing the eruption.