Parts of Tazacorte will go into home confinement when the molten rock reaches the Atlantic Ocean, and some people are choosing to get out before that happens.

Residents of Tazacorte, on the Spanish island of La Palma, where a new lava stream could soon reach the sea.

“What shall we take?”

“We’ll take everything.”

Encarni is nervous. Three of her nephews have just arrived with two pick-up trucks at the door of her house in San Borondón, the southernmost residential area in the municipality of Tazacorte, on the Spanish island of La Palma, where a volcano has been erupting since September 19.

The authorities have not ordered the area to evacuate, although they did warn that when the lava tongue reaches the ocean, a lockdown will be declared in four of the seven neighborhoods in the municipality to avoid the possible inhalation of dangerous gases such as carbon dioxide. Yesterday the molten rock was 30 meters from the shore and was traveling at a speed of between five and 10 meters per hour, according to the Volcanology Institute of the Canaries (Involcan), which is monitoring the eruption in this part of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa.

Encarni’s house, which has two floors and is next to the only restaurant in the area, is just 500 meters from the exclusion zone closest to the coast. “We’ll take it all because the lava is going to arrive,” says her husband, Juan, who is showing the youngsters how to load the boxes of crockery onto the pick-up trucks.

The couple has another house further north, in Punta Gorda, which they will use for storage. “They haven’t told us anything, but you can smell it already… Pull up your mask,” says Encarni to one of her nephews, amid a constant shower of ash.

The residents of Tazacorte are afraid. The tensions that have been ongoing during the month since this new volcano began to erupt are seeing people trying to stay a step ahead of the destructive forces of the lava. They have seen relatives and friends forced to empty their houses in record time, and they don’t want to be next. They are worried that the lava flow that branched off from the Callejón de la Gata industrial park in Los Llanos de Aridane and that is still moving toward the center of La Laguna could end up coming to their area, which is just three kilometers away.

On Saturday, the authorities called together the residents of Tazacorte, which is home to around 3,000 people, to give them information. At the meeting in the municipal sports center they handed over a leaflet with the different emergency scenarios and all of the steps that must be followed should there be a lockdown or an evacuation. That chat, which lasted more than two hours and allowed them to voice any doubts via a microphone, left the people even more concerned, as many who spoke that day have explained.