More than 343,000 hectares have burnt in Spain since the beginning of the year, a figure that continues to rise and is a record for the country, according to updated data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), an indicator of the European Copernicus observatory.
Until now, 2022 had been the worst year in terms of the area devastated by flames in Spain, with 306,000 hectares burnt.
Portugal holds the European record since records began in 2006, with 563,000 hectares burned in 2017 in fires that killed 119 people. The country has also been ravaged by flames this summer, with 216,000 hectares destroyed since the beginning of the year.
Since they broke out in early August, the mega-fires in Spain, which are concentrated in the northwest and west of the country, in Galicia, Castile and León, and Extremadura, have already claimed four lives.
In response to the scale of the devastation caused by these disasters, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced "a national pact to tackle the climate emergency" on Sunday.
Experts explain that global warming caused by human activity is making extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves, and fires more frequent, intense, and prolonged. But there are also local factors such as rural depopulation and uncontrolled vegetation growth that create conditions conducive to these massive fires.
