“Seeing our countryside go up in flames has really marked the people of Montanejos.”
These were the words of the town mayor Miguel Sandalinas after fire destroyed large swathes of the pine forest in this walkers’ paradise in Castellón province in 2023.
Regular hikers in Spain will have come across areas devastated by forest fires; be it in other municipalities in the Valencia region such as Jávea or Beniardá, or further afield.
No province in the country is safe from wildfires. Even Galicia in the wet and verdant north west, and the Cantabrian mountains, have been blighted in recent years.
Rising temperatures are taking their toll on the countryside, drying out the forests and making them vulnerable.
Coupled with the negligence of the human race, such as discarded cigarettes and uncontrolled burning of farming waste, and the activities of arsonists, it leaves a desperately hard job for the emergency services to try to snuff out fires before they turn into uncontrollable infernos.
The fast-spreading flames destroy invaluable habits for some of Spain’s most incredible fauna; the Iberian wolves and bears, as well as hundreds of other species.
One of the worst-affected areas that I have seen is Montanejos; it’s a wonderful rural area of ravines and mountains surrounded by vast swathes of forest that run as far as the eye can see.
Two fires in the last decade have torched large areas of pine wood and it is heartbreaking to see the devastation left by the wildfires.
On my last visit to Montanejos at the end of 2024, I was able to watch the construction of a much-improved look-out building on the summit of the highest mountain in the area, the Morrón de Campos, designed to provide early warnings of fires.
The town hall is also taking action, now operating drone flights during the summer so they can ‘react quickly to any outbreak’.
And they are installing a system of sensors this year ‘to obtain early warning of fires, or the risk of them’.
Speaking of the inferno which struck the forest in 2023, mayor Miguel Sandalinas said: “After suffering such a terrible fire we have become more watchful.
“We are working in advance in order to try to prevent this happening again.”
All-year-round threat
In previous decades, the authorities could rely on a having a forest fire season, in which they had to pump more resources into watching out for flames in rural areas and have resources at hand to deal with large scale fires.
However, in many areas of Spain the season is now all-year-round and, for example, in Valencia the whole region could be on high alert for forest fires in December or January, not just in the summer months.
Black year
The worst year of this century for fires in Spain came in 2022, as drought and ferociously high temperatures took their toll.
During that year a total of 310,000 hectares of land was laid waste by flames and European authorities reported that four out of every 10 hectares burned in the EU were in Spain.
The area destroyed was equivalent to the size of the province of Álava, while the average for the previous 15 years had been 67,000 hectares of affected countryside.
During 2022 there were 450 fires in Spain in which more than 30 hectares of land was burned. And the EU estimated that more than 28 million tonnes of CO2 was emitted during the blazes.
The worst affected province was Zamora, which was hit by two of the largest forest fires in Spain’s history; and 6.5% of the province was torched in the infernos.
The first of them started in Ferreras de Arriba on July 15 following a dry storm and flames destroyed a large swathe of the Sierra de la Culebra, home of the largest population of wolves in Spain.
A total of 28,046 hectares of countryside was reduced to ash in the fourth worst fire of this century in Spain.
But worse was to come. On July 17 a fire broke out between Losacio and Tábara which burned for a month. It had been caused by another dry storm.
A total of 32,528 hectares of land was destroyed in the worst fire of this century, with the flames reaching the Sierra de Culebra.
Four people died in this devastating inferno.
2024; a ‘good’ year
By contrast, 2024 saw 48,000 hectares of land burned in the whole of Spain in 12 months. This was the lowest figure since 1971 (35,044 hectares).
The worst year on record is 1985 when 484,476 hectares went up in smoke in Spain.
We can only hope that the wet start to 2025 bodes well for the rest of the year.
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