The largest permanent lagoon in drought-hit southern Spain’s Donana natural park, home of one of Europe’s largest wetlands, has completely dried out for the second summer in a row.

A huge patch of cracked white earth has replaced the waters of the Santa Olalla lagoon, which usually houses abundant aquatic life and huge colonies of migrating birds.

The lagoon — which once covered around 45 hectares (110 acres) — has been shrinking in recent years but this is the first time that it has dried out for two consecutive years, according to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Scientists blame the lagoon’s disappearance on a prolonged drought combined with the overexploitation of aquifers for farming and tourism.

Most lagoons in the reserve are temporary, filling with rainwater in winter and then drying out in the summer but a few contain water year-round, providing an important refuge for animal life.

The Donana national park is surrounded by a sea of greenhouses and the Matalascanas resort town is located less than a kilometre from the northernmost lagoons of the reserve.

The Dona reserve boasts marshlands, scrub woodland and beaches and is home to deer, badgers and endangered species including the Spanish imperial eagle and the Iberian lynx.

But at the Santa Olalla lagoon where wild horses once drank water surrounded by storks and flamingos, they now graze alone on the few tufts of grass they find growing from the cracked earth.

Despite warnings from UNESCO and the European Commission, the conservative regional government of Andalusia where Donana is located is pushing to extend irrigation rights near the park.

A draft law currently making its way through the regional parliament would regularise hundreds of hectares of berry farmland currently irrigated by illegal wells.

Defenders of the proposal argue it will aid those who unfairly missed out during a previous regularisation of farms in the area put in place in 2014 under a Socialist government.

Indonesia is expecting a longer dry season, lasting until October, due to the El Niño weather pattern, threatening clean water supply and increasing the risk of forest fires, the country’s disaster agency said on Monday.

Indonesia’s weather agency has pushed back its forecast for the peak of the dry season due to El Niño’s impact to September and October, compared with its previous estimate of August to September, Abdul Muhari, spokesperson for the disaster agency BNPB, told an online media briefing.

This has the potential to exacerbate drought in islands below the equator in the archipelago, which include Java – home to over 150 million people, as well as Bali and Nusa Tenggara.

“It has been two months of dry weather in Java and it’s worrying because the extreme impact of El Niño will last until October,” Abdul said, warning that water levels at a reservoir near Jakarta have significantly dropped.

This year’s dry season is expected to be the most severe since 2019, partially due to the return of El Niño, the weather agency has previously said.

Six have died in a remote, mountainous region in the country’s eastern Papua region, where thousands are facing hunger brought on by drought, authorities said in July.

Authorities also warned that some provinces, such as Aceh in the northern tip of Sumatra island, had experienced frequent forest fires in recent weeks even though the country’s total number of forest fires in July were lower than in 2019.

The disaster agency recorded 75 fires in July, compared to 115 in the same month in 2019.

The Southeast Asian nation experienced devastating forest fires in 2015 and 2019 that blanketed the country and parts of Southeast Asia region with haze. The 2019 fires caused about $5.2 billion of economic losses in the eight Indonesian provinces, according to the World Bank.

Flights serving the eastern Sicilian city of Catania were halted on Monday after an eruption from nearby Mount Etna, local authorities said, bringing fresh travel woe to the crisis-plagued Italian airport.

The 3,330 metre (10,925 ft) high volcano burst into action overnight, firing lava and ash high over the Mediterranean island. The lava flow subsided before dawn, but ash was still coming from one of the craters.

Flights to and from Catania, a popular tourist destination, will remain suspended until 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) on Tuesday morning, the airport operator said in a statement, dashing hopes they could resume on Monday night.

Passengers were advised to check with airlines before heading to the airport on Tuesday.

Incoming flights were diverted to other airports on Sicily on Monday. It is the peak of the summer holiday season in Italy where Tuesday is a public holiday.

Catania Mayor Enrico Trantino banned the use of motorcycles and bicycles in the city for the next 48 hours, because many streets were covered in ash, and ordered cars to drive no faster than 30 kph (19 mph) due to the skiddy conditions.

The latest cancellations at Catania airport, which attracts more arrivals than the island’s capital, Palermo, came a month after a fire at a terminal building led to weeks of disruptions for passengers.

The last major eruption of Etna was in 1992.

Torrential rain in India’s Himalayas triggered landslides over the weekend that have killed over 50 people, with the death toll expected to rise as more than 20 remain trapped or missing, officials said on Monday.

Unusually heavy rain and melting glaciers have brought deadly flash floods to the mountains of India and neighbouring Pakistan and Nepal over the past year or two, with government officials increasingly blaming climate change.

Television footage from India’s Himachal Pradesh state showed houses flattened by landslides, buses and cars hanging on the edge of precipices after roads gave way, and hundreds of people at rescue sites as emergency workers struggled to clear debris.

“Again, tragedy has befallen Himachal Pradesh, with continuous rainfall over the past 48 hours,” the state’s chief minister, Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, said in a post on the messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

More than 50 people had died in rain-related incidents within 24 hours, Sukhu told Indian news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake.

“This number can rise further because 20 people are still trapped,” he said.

Officials from the state disaster management authority, meanwhile, said that 41 bodies had been recovered by Monday evening.

“Another 13 people are missing but, as time passes, we are losing hope that they will be pulled out alive,” said state disaster management official Praveen Bhardwaj.

In one of the most deadly incidents, a temple collapsed in the state capital, Shimla, with rescuers pulling out at least nine bodies, the chief minister said.

In Solan district, houses collapsed, killing at least seven people, and a mother and her child were killed in Mandi district when their house collapsed, Bhardwaj said.

Television footage showed swollen rivers breaking their banks in Himachal and neighbouring Uttarakhand state, where also two people died and four were missing in incidents related to the rains, the Uttarakhand Disaster Management control room told Reuters.

The India Meteorological Department issued a “red alert” for both states on Monday and has forecast rainfall intensity to reduce from Tuesday onwards.

Parts of Himachal and Uttarakhand received as much as 273 mm (10.75 inches) and 419 mm (16.54 inches) of rain in 24 hours till 8:30 am IST (3 am GMT) on Monday, the weather office said.

Schools and other educational institutes were ordered to close in Himachal Pradesh and people in vulnerable areas were being moved to relief shelters, state officials said.

Uttarakhand state authorities announced that the Char Dham pilgrimage route would be closed until Tuesday following landslides.

Brimstone Hill Fortress, also known as Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, is a historic fortress which has been preserved in well condition, located on a hill on the island of Saint Kitts, which is part of the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Being one of the most important historical, cultural and architectural monuments of the Caribbean island nation, it was built in 17 century by African slaves, while the island was under British mandate.

The fortress is considered to be a great monument to the ingenuity of the British military engineers who designed it, and it is also a testimony to the European colonial expansion, the African slave trade and the emergence of new societies in the Caribbean area.

The first cannons were brought to the hill in 1690, when the British used them to recapture Fort Charles from the French, and since then the fortress has been under constant maintenance in order for the islands to remain under British rule.

In those days, the fort has been known as the Gibraltar of the West Indies, in reference to its imposing steepness and height, its proximity to the sea, and its seeming invulnerability, which is almost the same as Gibraltar in Europe.

There have been plenty of fights and sieges of the Brimstone Hill Fortress, however, in 1853 it was abandoned by the British when the structure began to decay through vandalism and natural processes.

That is why with the beginning of 20 century, the process of stabilization and restoration of the structures that remained started, and the first part of the fort which was completely restored, was opened in 1973 by Prince Charles, while later in 1985, Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a plaque with which the fortress was named as a National Park.

Still, the principal structures which are situated on different levels of the upper third of the hill were constructed in dressed stone blocks with a rubble core, and they are also decorated with local limestone which is used as a decoration for quoins and for facing round doorways and embrasures.

The heart of the fortress, Fort George also known as the Citadel, dominates one of the twin peeks, and due to the high importance the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park embraces, it has been put on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1999. Being one of the most important places on the main island, the fortress is visited more and more often by the people who are exploring the small island of Saint Kitts.