Miguel Riopa / AFP
A fire raged in the village of Veiga Das Meas, in the municipality of Villadevos, in the northwest of Spain, on August 16, 2025.
INTERNATIONAL – It is a fatal record, which currently does not seem to stop. While in Spain, thousands of firefighters and soldiers still fight this Monday, August 18 against devastating fires in the west and northwest of the country, hectare figures burned since the beginning of the year have already achieved levels never observed in the country.
According to the European Forest Fire Information System (effis), the year 2022 had so far been the worst in Spain on the fire front, with 306,000 charred hectares. But this record has already been broken: the flames have already ravaged more than 343,000 hectares since the beginning of 2025 in the country, even though fires are still not checked.
Portugal has the European record, since the start of the statements in 2006, with 563,000 hectares burned in 2017, in fires that left 119 dead.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 560,000 hectares have burned in the Iberian peninsula, still in the grip of violent claims this summer. They have been particularly virulent since the start of a heat wave 15 days ago, and which have already killed six.
“Like fog”
A small note of hope begins to be born: this heat wave, fuel of fires, is coming to an end, according to the Spanish weather agency (AEMET). But pending possible beneficial effects of a drop in temperatures, which reached up to 45 ° C in the south of Spain, no lulls were in sight on Monday.
The most serious claims are concentrated in the extremadors (west), Galicia (north-west) and Castille-et-León (northwest) regions. Thousands of evacuations are preparing for the advance of the flames, notably in Ribadelago (Castille-et-León), where Andrea Fernandez, 29, told AFP to perceive “Lots of smoke” and feel a smell of “Burned”. “It’s as if there was fog, we don’t see the mountains that are 1 km away, some people wear masks”she described.
From her window, she sees planes and helicopters succeeding herself around the lake of Sanabria, to make water reserves and pour them into the fire areas. The farmers in the area, they went down their animals to shelter them.
Like all residents of Ribadelago, Andrea Fernandez received several alerts on her phone inviting him to a “Voluntary evacuation”in an area where many vacationers are present in addition to the inhabitants.
“We currently have 23 active levels of level 2”which designates fires representing a serious and direct threat to the population, summed up this Monday morning on public television TVE Virginia Barcones, Director General of Civil Protection and Emergencies in Spain.
Two new victims in Portugal and Spain
“It is a very difficult, very complicated situation”explained to Tve the Spanish Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, evoking the « virulence » and the“Fighting” fires, as well as smoke, visible from space and which complicates “Air interventions”.
In the past few hours, these claims have also made two new victims, a firefighter in Spain and another in Portugal, raising the record for four deaths in the first country and two in the second.
The situation, on the other hand, has improved significantly in the Balkans, where the drop in temperatures and the arrival of the rain helped the emergency services to extinguish or control dozens of fires, which had killed two for a week. Also in Turkey, two important fires are now under control, according to the authorities, one of which, had led to the night from Saturday to Sunday the evacuation of hundreds of people from seven villages in the Tourist Province of Celanakkale, in the northwest of the country.