The Almuñécar fire service was called in to rescue a paraglider pilot after he landed in a roadside palm tree on the La Herradura seafront paseo.

The victim, a 59-year-old Dutch citizen, was unscathed physically although his sense of pride would have been a bit tarnished as the rescue efforts to bring him down had attracted a small crowd busily filming everything.

The chords on the canopy had become wrapped around the trunk and the canopy itself in the fronds at the top, leaving him clinging to the trunk of the tree.

Besides the fire service, the Guardia Civil, Policía Local and an ambulance from the medical centre were also present.

The fire service used a simple ladder to reach him, but the very chords that prevented him from falling in the first place were now complicating things getting the clinging man from the tree trunk – he was literally bound to the tree.

So they deployed their extending ladder on the fire engine, with its cage with two fire personnel in it to free the man in order to bring him down. Finally, half an hour had passed since he collided with the tree, to the moment when he could step into the cage and be brought down.

The canopy and the tangled chords remained on the tree to be removed at a later moment.

If the roadworks all along that end of the paseo (he crash landed not far from Pizeria Realengo) weren’t enough to obstruct traffic flow, the rescue of the Flying Dutchman certainly was as the rescue vehicles and the gathered, curious bystanders made transit very difficult.

(News: Herradura, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia – Photo: JM de Haro)