It's over, according to PEVOLCA the eruption of the island of El Hierro is over. It has been eight months in which we have seen evacuations, infrastructure closures, inconveniences and a lot of fear. The scientific committee has been unanimous, there is no seismic activity, no instrumental measurements, no volcanic tremor, and no anomaly can be seen with infrared sensors from the air.

However, the surveillance work will continue, since in the era of instrumentation, it is the first time that a post-eruptive process becomes a reality and a new experience in Spain. At 88 m depth there remains the signature of so much volcanic activity: a new cone that in the end did not emerge as the tenth Canary sister.

However ".... The volcanic process has not finished, which means that the yellow traffic light must be maintained on the island and possibly determinations will be made regarding the area of the submarine eruption, which continued in red...", said the Director general of Security and Emergency of the Government of the Canary Islands, Juan Manuel Santana.

We must point out something: the decision that this activity has ended is ours, it is always ours, an area is seismic or volcanic if the BOE says so, the truth is that Mother Nature usually does not care about our catalogs and systematic classifications of its activities. When she wants she will wake up again with the energy she wants.

But one thing is clear, we have learned a lot about the emergency management , we can even put a good grade, scientifically we have not done badly, although we could have squeezed much more the telluric potential, the interaction of the local fauna, especially the behavior of domestic species that foresaw the most powerful earthquakes, something that we could all see on television with shepherds and goats as protagonists. During this time of eruptions a couple of English universities and NASA itself published several papers on the behavior of domestic species, or the toads of L'Aquila before seismic and volcanic events, Nature put the laboratory on a platter for 8 months.
Tourist projection

As for the tourist projection, now El Hierro "is better placed" on the map of lovers of geological phenomena and some scientists and amateurs, a potential very little exploited; Only the Cabildo of El Hierro, timidly approached the tourism fair in London and now Berlin in the person of Veronica Montero, an adventurous initiative, leisure and scenic, plus an application for mobile devices called "El Hierro" with cultural, scientific and tourist queries scattered throughout the island.

The German lovers of the island, of its walks, its climate and its customs never left us, also by the ratings of their televisions it seems that they have been the best followers of the scientific, volcano-seismic events of the island, much more than us. They know much more than the peninsulars about the sustainability of El Hierro, about its energy cleanliness, about its natural, cultural and scientific heritage, about the Bimbache petroglyphs.

Hopefully, if the alarm is triggered again someday, there will be a brave bet, with a scientific and cultural infrastructure embodied in a center of interpretation of seismo-volcanic events, or something serious accompanied by prestigious or simply informative lines of research , as in the Azores, with its center of interpretation of volcanoes and its thousands of annual visitors that enrich their community.