Area Of Spain Burned In Wildfires In 2025 Already Three Times Seasonal Average From 2006 To 2024

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Despite the annual fires and the abundance of evidence, she says, “it turns out that we are not – and we do not want to be – aware of the danger in which we’re living”. If we were even a little aware, she adds, “we would take the measures and decisions to protect ourselves”. Fifty years ago, says Montiel, most forest fires were intentional. But today’s forest fires are increasingly caused by accidents or negligence and are spreading so voraciously because of two factors: landscape change and climate change.

It is an explosive combination. This year’s heavy spring rains led to an increase in plant growth that has now been dried out by successive heatwaves, leaving all that combustible vegetation, much of it in neglected areas, ready to serve as fuel for the fires. The situation is further complicated by the phenomenon of “flash droughts”, which can quickly dry out even well-irrigated agricultural land, and which are likely to become more common as global heating continues.

Paüls is a case in point. Its population has dwindled over the decades and fewer and fewer people in the area work the land because of the shrinking economic rewards. “If there were 100 people working the land before, now there are 30,” says Adell. “If the same policies continue and things remain as hard as they are, then in a few years, there’ll be almost no one.”

All those years of abandonment had left ravines, gullies and pine forests overgrown and made them into temperature-activated timebombs. Last month’s fire, says the mayor, was simply uncontrollable: “We saw that there was no way of stopping it.” If there is much truth in the idea that preparation is all – and in the old maxim that “fires are put out in winter” – the challenge now lies in undoing decades of neglect and bad planning that have seen the landscape forgotten and the appearance of housing developments in hazardous places.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/16/pauls-spain-wildfires-climate-change