Spain Extends Its Wildfire Campaign to 31 October After a Season Burning 275,000 Hectares

Spain has extended its summer wildfire campaign by a month, keeping emergency crews on alert until 31 October after one of the most punishing fire seasons in recent memory. The decision was taken on Tuesday by the Integrated Operational Coordination Centre, the national body that coordinates the response to forest fires, meeting under the Interior Ministry's civil protection directorate.

The figures explain why. Since 1 January, Spain has recorded 8,122 forest fires that have burned 275,209 hectares, some 151 per cent above the average of the past decade. Forty-five of those blazes qualified as major fires, the third-highest count in ten years, and together they account for more than 221,000 hectares, around 80 per cent of the total area burned. Twenty-one people have died, compared with eight last year, and 70 have been injured. More than 118,000 people were evacuated as a precaution.

The human toll was concentrated in a handful of events. Fifteen people died in the Los Gallardos fire in Almería in July, and a soldier of the military emergencies unit, Sergeant Javier García Sancho, was killed while fighting a blaze in Huesca. On 23 July, fires in Burgohondo in Ávila and Villa del Prado and San Martín de Valdeiglesias in Madrid led Spain to activate, for the first time ever, the highest national emergency level for forest fires, known as Operational Situation 3. That episode alone led to the preventive evacuation of more than 63,000 residents.

The response has been large and international. The government deployed some 1,300 members of the military emergencies unit, along with thousands of Civil Guard and National Police officers and dozens of aerial and ground units. Help also arrived from abroad: Greece, Italy, Serbia and Turkey sent aircraft, firefighters and specialised vehicles, Portugal contributed 121 firefighters, and Qatar provided 60 forest agents under bilateral agreements.

Virginia Barcones, Spain's Secretary General for Civil Protection, described the season as one of the most demanding in recent years and said the resources would stay in place until the risk falls significantly. She added that the lessons learned would help the national civil protection system face future emergencies with greater experience.

The Spanish figures sit within a wider European picture. Satellite data from the European Forest Fire Information System, cited by Spanish media last week, put the country's burned area at close to 300,000 hectares by late September, around 44 per cent of the EU total, with Galicia's fragmented, eucalyptus-dominated forests again at the centre of the debate over prevention. Last year, Spain's burned area was the worst since 1994, which means 2026 is the second consecutive year in which fire has stretched the country's capacity.

Why It Matters

Spain's decision to keep crews on duty until 31 October shows that the fire season is stretching beyond its traditional calendar, and with it the cost of adaptation. A fire year that burns 151 per cent above the decade average, in a country that had its worst season since 1994 only twelve months ago, is a signal that climate risk is no longer an occasional shock but a recurring planning assumption. For businesses and public bodies alike, resilience spending is becoming a core part of climate action, not an optional extra.