Pedreguer shows its love for burning Amazon

Outraged residents in Pedreguer staged a minute's silence to condemn the mass destruction of the Brazilian Amazon, along with a music, dance and poetry flash-mob to 'show their love' for the world's largest rainforest. Live music by the band Charli & Heiko, a dance show by Nanny Alvés and a 'poetry-reading jam session' drew in crowds in the Marina Alta town on Monday.

Essays and verses recited expressed residents' horror over the biggest forest fire on earth, which has been started in nearly 72,000 places and is believed to be deliberate.

A petition on SumOfUs has started doing the rounds, calling for the European Union's recent historic deal with its tri-national counterpart in South America, MERCOSUR, to be axed.

The campaign says huge swathes of rainforest in Brazil are going up in smoke to clear land for grazing cattle for the EU-MERCOSUR meat trade.

Far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is thought to be behind the massacre, although Bolsonaro blames environmental groups, claiming they are trying to 'get his attention'.

During the recent G7 summit, the other six of the world's wealthiest nations offered €18 million to combat the fires, but Bolsonaro has turned it down – unless French president Emmanuel Macron 'apologises' for his 'insults', or rather, his reaction to his Brazilian counterpart's rude remarks to Macron's wife.

Amazon deforestation has already contributed to increased levels of carbon dioxide worldwide and fuelled global warming, as stretches the size of whole towns have been turned into grazing land.

This has turned out to be unprofitable, since the pasture is under several metres of water for about half the year. Deep in the relatively-unexplored 'white-water' corners of the forest – which lies along the banks of a 1,000kilometre-long river – tribes have been displaced after their habitats were destroyed by developers and those seeking to expand their agricultural land.

The Amazon rainforest, most of which lies in northern Brazil but which also spills into Perú and Ecuador, provides over 20% of the world's oxygen.