Global Wildfires At Record Low This Year

The Spanish countryside and fire are inseparable; even the mountain range that separates us from the rest of Europe – the Pyrenees – owes its name to a fire (piros in Latin), as Strabo recounted in the 2nd century BC. To seek a link between a slight rise in temperatures and a supposed increase in the intensity of fires is to look for problems where there aren’t any.
The area burnt by forest fires in Spain over the last fifty years has fallen from the peaks reached between 1975 and 1995 (precisely during the coldest period of the 20th century, although the reason has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the abandonment of the countryside and migration to the big cities), when fires burnt an average of 28000 km² per decade, to an average of less than 10000 km² per decade between 2000 and 2025.
It is true that there have been some major fires in recent years, and particularly this year’s major fire in Ávila. However, the figure of 500 square kilometres initially given by the Ministry for Ecological Transition was found to be an exaggeration when images from the Sentinel satellite were examined: the fire burnt 375 km², and that is the combined area of two separate fires that eventually merged. If we are talking about major historical fires, this pales in comparison to the fire in Castile in the year AD 949 which, taking into account the provinces affected according to the documents we have preserved, may have burnt more than 50000 km².
In any case, what matters is the reason why large-scale fires still occur, and the answer is very easy to explain with a couple of facts: the area of forest in Spain has increased by 10% since 1975, but at the same time, woody biomass has increased by 300%. There are far fewer small and medium-sized fires, because fire is no longer a traditional farming tool for land management and because fire-fighting methods have improved; but when the right conditions arise, fires can travel many kilometres without running out of fuel to keep them burning.