The cocktail behind the wildfires ravaging Spain: Unprecedented heat waves and a changing relationship with the countryside

The wildfires that have ravaged Madrid, Ávila, and Toledo have set off alarms that were no surprise to scientists who have been warning about the danger for years. These large blazes are not an exception, are not confined to specific regions, and are not going to disappear. So far this year, up to Tuesday July 28, 173,000 hectares have burned — six times more than in the same period last year — and 35 large fires have been reported compared with seven in 2025. Where are official efforts failing? Experts argue the only solution is to adapt to the new situation and focus on prevention through landscape management. Rural abandonment has transformed the territory and vegetation has proliferated. Added to that is the spread of housing developments and scattered homes on the rural-urban interface, where contact between houses and the forest multiplies the risk and makes firefighting efforts more difficult.

Fewer fires, but larger areas burned

There is not a greater number of fires, but “they burn more intensely, have greater heat capacity and are harder to control,” says Cristina Montiel, professor of geography at the Complutense University in Madrid and a wildfire specialist. The figures confirm that change in behavior: although the overall number of fires has fallen by 33% compared with the average for the last decade, the burned area has increased by 8%, according to WWF. The conservation NGO, which has analyzed wildfire trends for more than 20 years, also warns that the probability of a fire becoming a large blaze has risen by 47%.

“Behind the new scenario are changes in weather conditions due to climate change, as well as changes in the landscape,” Montiel explains. Under the previous system, vegetation did not accumulate because the land was used for agriculture and livestock, but that model has disappeared. The fires in Madrid and Ávila, like others, reflect that new reality. “They have coincided with heat waves that dry out vegetation, with extremely high temperatures that do not drop at night,” adds Lourdes Hernández, WWF’s head of fire response. Added to that is the growing number of villages, developments, and isolated homes next to forests, which increases the risk. “Aesthetic interests have been prioritized while safety has been sidelined, because more people live in rural areas without making a living from them,” Hernández notes.

Adapt and prepare

Fires are not going to disappear because they are part of the natural dynamics of ecosystems. The solution is to adapt and prepare. “Unfortunately, neither of those two things is being addressed sufficiently,” warns Professor Montiel. It is a task that requires involvement from the state, regional governments, and town councils, but also from citizens. “For 20 years we have been insisting that the area around the San Juan reservoir [one of the places most affected by the fires] was a very serious problem, that the way it was managed had to change, and they didn’t do it,” Montiel says. She adds that shared responsibility is failing. “The public and landowners and people who live in the countryside, in developments and peri-urban areas, are not aware of the risks, and self-protection plans are insufficient.”

She explains that it is necessary to prepare the land, and people, to reduce the danger: to have planned evacuation routes and to manage vegetation at three points — within properties, around developments, and across the surrounding landscape. All this depends on town councils, which must have prevention plans and implement them, as the forestry law requires of municipalities with a high fire risk. “Let’s see if we begin to learn,” Montiel says.

“It is about managing strategically chosen areas, promoting a mosaic structure with traditional agriculture — with crops that stay green in summer such as olive groves, vineyards, sunflowers — alongside prescribed burns, clearing operations...” adds Víctor Resco, forestry engineer and professor at the University of Lleida.

And reducing fuel: the biomass found on the ground — leaf litter, firewood etc. “The undergrowth is what fuels a fire; it quadruples the speed of the fire,” Resco adds. Some environmental organizations fear that this emphasis on management will ultimately lead to the destruction of large wooded areas. Resco responds that “we’re talking about managing 5% of the 27 million hectares of forest in Spain.”

Are current firefighting resources sufficient?

There is broad scientific consensus that current resources are adequate. “The key does not lie in increasing resources for suppression, but in prevention and land management,” wrote María Luisa Chas-Amil, professor of applied economics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, in a recent article in The Conversation. The estimated total budget for the state as a whole could exceed €1.8 billion a year. Of that, around 78% is allocated to suppression and 22% to prevention, the paper indicates.

But they encountered fragmented, hardly comparable information, as well as a lack of transparency and difficulty accessing data on executed spending. Despite these difficulties, the authors note that “a continuous increase in spending is not economically sustainable.” In Galicia, the estimated allocation far exceeds the budgets of some regional ministries such as the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. All this while keeping in mind that a large number of fires are extinguished in the initial stage (under one hectare).

Montiel considers current firefighting operations to be “excellent in quantity, quality, organization, and training.” Another issue, she adds, is that they should also collaborate in prevention. “Often they can’t because [temporary] contracts are concentrated in the dangerous months, and that is a colossal error today.”

Volunteer networks

Beyond prevention plans, teams of trained, organized volunteers prepared to deal with fires and other emergencies make a difference in their local areas. Jávea (Valencia), for example, has a volunteer firefighter group in Balcón al Mar and 48 members of Civil Protection (30 of them trained to intervene in fires), trained and equipped by the town council, who are distributed across the municipality to patrol. “This cooperation allows fires to be put out when they are in their early stages,” says Ferrán Dalmau, forest engineer and fire-prevention expert. “Working together is the way to manage what is coming at us. You have to choose between improvisation or planning, and that is the difference between some places and others,” he says.

Risk reduction means complying with regulations: keeping the plot clean, maintaining a safety strip around the home, or having a self-protection plan when the development or house is in isolated settlements.

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