Portugal has managed to put an end to a series of deadly fires

Portugal managed on Friday to control all the forest fires that have hit the north and centre of the country this week, killing five people and devastating some 100,000 hectares of vegetation, emergency services announced. “All the situations that were still active yesterday and today at dawn have been controlled,” the national commander of civil protection, André Fernandes, said at a press conference.

Dozens of fires

While falling temperatures and the arrival of rain have helped put out the fires, heavier downpours could cause landslides in the areas affected by the fires in the coming days, he warned. Since Saturday, firefighters have had to deal with more than a thousand fires, fanned by the stifling heat and strong winds that have hit the Iberian country. Dozens of these fires have flared up, particularly in the Aveiro region (north), where four outbreaks have reached a perimeter of around a hundred kilometres and ravaged some 20,000 hectares of vegetation, according to an estimate provided Thursday by the European Copernicus Observatory.

Across the country, the area burned by fires since the beginning of the year now stands at more than 120,000 hectares, of which 60% is forest, 29% is scrubland and 11% is agricultural land, according to data from the National Institute for Nature and Forest Conservation (ICNF).

A particularly heavy toll

The overwhelming majority of this damage was caused by this week’s fires, as the area burned up to the end of August barely exceeded 10,000 hectares. The 2024 toll is therefore already the heaviest since the black year of 2017, when the area burned reached 500,000 hectares.

The fires of June and October 2017 also caused the death of more than a hundred people. According to a report drawn up on Friday, this week’s fires have caused five deaths, including four firefighters, and a hundred injuries, including 14 serious ones. The government declared a day of national mourning on Friday, and thanked France, Spain, Italy and Morocco for sending a dozen water bomber planes as reinforcements. Experts believe that increasingly intense heat waves and droughts are promoting forest fires and are consequences of climate change, which is particularly affecting the Iberian Peninsula.