José Antonio Bruña, a honey producer, is standing on a hillside where he keeps his beehives near the small Spanish village of Porto de Sanabria.

He points to the exact spot, a few hundred metres away on the mountain opposite, where lightning struck a few weeks earlier, igniting a wildfire that had disastrous consequences.

"This August has been a nightmare for me personally, but also for the local farmers and everyone here in the village," he says. "I'm 47 and I've never seen a fire that fierce."

It ended up burning more than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of land and causing thousands of people to be evacuated from villages in this farming-heavy corner of north-western Spain, near the Portuguese border.

But it was just one of several vast blazes which have devastated Spain this summer, burning 0.8% of the country's surface area.

The most heavily affected zones were here in the north-west, including the regions of Castilla y León and Galicia, plus the western region of Extremadura.

Honey production, which is an important industry in rural north-west Spain, was one of the main casualties of the summer. Mr Bruña knows people who have lost up to 400 beehives in the fires.

Fortunately, his own 1,500 hives are intact, because the fire stopped just metres away from the fields where he keeps them. But the damage caused to nearby flora will have serious repercussions for his business.

"I calculate that this year I'm going to lose 50% of my honey production, at the very least, because of the fires, and the following year the same, or even worse," Mr Bruña says. This is because of the time it will take for the flowers that bees need to grow back again in surrounding fields.

"There are some types of flower that won't appear again for three years," he explains.

The lack of structural damage to his hives means he cannot........

© BBC