Deadly wildfires ravaging Spain have burnt the equivalent of nearly half a million football fields this year, setting a new record for the country in August, a European monitor said Monday.
The fires have so far burnt more than 343,000 hectares (848,000 acres), according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), surpassing the record of 306,000 hectares for the same period in 2022.
Portugal set the European record of 563,000 hectares scorched in 2017, when 119 people were killed. The country has already seen 216,000 hectares burnt in 2025, according to Effis, which has been gathering data for two decades.
Spain’s fires this year have been focused on the northwest regions of Galicia and Castilla y León, and have claimed four lives.
Advertisement
The Molezuelas forest fire which is currently raging between León and Zamora provinces in the north of the country have also been referred to in the Spanish press as the worst fire in the country’s history with 38,000 hectares destroyed.
Two firefighters were killed on Sunday — one in each country, both in road accidents — taking the death toll to two in Portugal and four in Spain.
The head of Spain’s Civil Protection and Emergencies, Virginia Barcones, told broadcaster TVE there were currently 23 “active fires” that pose a serious and direct threat to the population.
The fires, now in their second week, were concentrated in the northwest regions of Galicia, Castilla y León, and Extremadura.
In Ourense province of Galicia, signs of the fires were everywhere, from ashen forests and blackened soil to destroyed homes, with thick smoke forcing people to wear facemasks.
Advertisement
Firefighters battled to put out fires, as locals in just shorts and T-shirts used water from hoses and buckets to try to stop the spread.
One resident in O Barco de Valdeorras, dousing his home with water from a hosepipe, described the wildfire that ripped through his area as “like a bomb”.
“It came from below and it was like a hurricane,” he said. “The good thing was that in two minutes it headed up and it didn’t stay here long.
“If not, our house would have been burnt, it would not have survived.”
‘Complicated situation’
Barcones said she hoped weather conditions would turn to help tackle the fires. Spain’s meteorological agency said the heatwave, which has seen temperatures hit 45C in parts of the country, was coming to an end.
Elsewhere, authorities in Turkey said two major fires had been brought under control, while rain and falling temperatures have helped firefighters extinguish dozens of blazes in the Balkans.
Spain is being helped with firefighting aircraft from France, Italy, Slovakia and the Netherlands, while Portugal is receiving air support from Sweden and Morocco.
“It’s a very difficult, very complicated situation,” Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles told TVE.
The size and severity of the fires and the intensity of the smoke — visible from space — were making “airborne action” difficult,” she added.
Officials in Castile and Leon said a firefighter died on Sunday night when the water truck he was driving flipped over on a steep forest road and down a slope.
Two other volunteer firefighters have died in Castile and Leon, while a Romanian employee of a riding school north of Madrid lost his life trying to protect horses from the fire.
In Portugal, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said a firefighter died on Sunday in a traffic accident that left two colleagues seriously injured.
A former mayor in the eastern town of Guarda died on Friday while trying to tackle a fire.
Some 2,000 firefighters were deployed across northern and central Portugal on Monday, with about half of them concentrated in the town of Arbanil.
Some 216,000 hectares of land have been destroyed across Portugal since the start of the year.
With additional reporting by The Local Spain’s editor Alex Dunham.
