Weather report
In the heat wave, Europe in overheating fights against fires
From Spain to Balkans, extreme heat causes devastating fires. Several thousand people have been evacuated.
A firefighter fights a forest fire in the village of Vilaza, near Verin, Spain, August 12, 2025.
AFP
Europe suffocates Tuesday under the weight of a heat wave that is dragged, a situation conducive to fires, whose number and intensity are favored by global warming, especially in the Iberian peninsula where thousands of evacuations have taken place.
Red heat wave alerts have been launched in Italy, France, Portugal, Balkans or Spain, where the National Meteorology Agency (AEMET) announced that the heat wave was going to continue “probably” until Monday.
In this country, where several dozen fires are currently active, a volunteer who participated in the fight against fire died on Tuesday by fighting a fire in the León region (North West). During the night from Monday to Tuesday, another man perished burned, in a fire in Tres Cantos, a locality located 25 km north of Madrid. “We are at extreme risk for forest fires,” according to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on X.
About a thousand soldiers from the Military Emergency Unit (UME), which intervenes during natural disasters, is deployed on the main claims.
Ravaged natural site
Sometimes evacuated in an emergency, nearly 6000 people had been forced to spend the night outside their home. Many started to return to their home on Tuesday thanks to improving the situation, but new evacuation orders on Tuesday complicate the count.
Thus, in the province of Cadiz in Andalusia, several hundred of the 2,000 evacuated people received authorization on Tuesday morning to return home, after a fire under control last week at Tarifa, at the southern tip of the country, resumed on Monday.
But in Castille-et-Léon, at least 3000 people were evacuated, according to local authorities. In this northwest region, fires have notably ravaged the natural site of Las Médulas-classified by UNESCO as World Heritage of Humanity-and if a few hundred nearby residents have been able to return, several homes remain active. A man was arrested, suspected of having voluntarily sparked a fire which had destroyed 2,200 hectares in the province of Ávila.
European mechanism
In neighboring Portugal, the other country the hardest hit by fires, the bells sounded in the morning to give the alert in the village of Transcoso (center), the most worrying loss site.
In addition to the 700 firefighters, the inhabitants mobilized, watering the land around their house with the help of pipes in the hope of braking the advance of the flames.
Greece called on the European mechanism to combat forest fires in the face of new homes that have declared themselves. The most dangerous are on the island of Zante in the Ionian Sea (West), in cities in the west of continental Greece as well as in the department of Achaïa in the west of the Peloponnesis where around twenty preventive evacuations of villages were carried out. The Greek media showed a flame factory near Patras, the third city in the country.
Italy is not spared, with eleven cities placed on red alert due to the heat wave, including almost all the largest cities in the country (Rome, Milan, Turin, etc.).
Heat dome
In France, 14 departments in the Southwest and Center-East are on a heat wave and two thirds of the country in Orange. At least five meteorological stations broke their temperature record on Tuesday, like the 42.9 ° C recorded in Saint-Laurent-du-Pape in Ardèche (southeast) and Saint-Côme d’Olt in Aveyron (southwest), according to Météo-France.
“It is suffocating, there is no air, only concrete,” notes Andréa, 21, who approaches pedestrians on behalf of an association in Lyon (center-east).
“The heat wave currently affecting France, Spain and the Balkan countries is not surprising,” Akshays Deoras, a meteorology expert at the British University of Reading, in writing. “It is led by a dome of heat that persists above Europe. Due to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world, and this reality increases both the frequency and intensity of heat waves, “he continued.
In addition, drought has become daily reality for more than half of Europe, mainly for the Mediterranean periphery, for several months, a situation conducive to fires.
Alarming sign of a phenomenon that threatens the continent, the British environment agency said on Tuesday that the water shortage in England was now classified “of national importance”. The first six months of the year have been the driest since 1976, a year that had been marked by a very strong drought in Europe.
Balkans on the front line
An air pollution alert was launched in London by the municipality and rail traffic was disrupted, dried up soils moving the trains.
Scottish firefighters sparked an alert for “very high” risk of fire between August 13 and 19 in several regions and call on the population to act “with responsibility”, to avoid portable barbecues, campfires and jets of cigarette butts.
In the southeast of the continent, the Balkans are also on the front line, whether it is Albania, where several hundred firefighters and soldiers fight fires, Montenegro or Croatia.
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