It is not only in Spain that vegetation fires rage in recent days. The fires also strike Portugal and they even made a first fatal victim on Friday in Guarda, in the east of the country. It would be a man who was fighting the flames in his commune, announced the President of the Republic, indicating that he interrupted his holidays and returned to follow the “serious situation of rural fires”.
Several thousand firefighters have been hard at work for days to fight the various homes in the country. The government has also activated, like its neighbor Spain, “the European Union’s civil protection mechanism” and requested the sending of four Canadair planes to stay on the national territory “until August 18,” said the Presidency of the Republic.
Large investments to avoid fire starts
After the deadly fires of 2017, which left more than a hundred dead (119), Portugal has multiplied by ten investment in prevention and doubled its budget for fighting forest fires. The Iberian country had thus managed to decrease the burned surface each year on average over the period 2018-2023 to 54,500 hectares, a third of what it was over the period 2001-2017, according to the government agency for the management of forest fires (AGIF).
But the fires that ravaged Portugal for three days of September 2024 alone reversed this downward trend, with an annual burned area of 138,000 hectares, four times larger than in 2023. The year 2024 was marked by the death of 12 people, nine firefighters and three civilians, the heaviest toll since the dark year of 2017.
