Southern Europe burns: wildfires come early and come hot

A week into July, the fire season that usually announces itself in August has already taken hold. In southern France, fires have burned since the start of the month across the Hérault and the Aude, with more than a thousand hectares gone in each, and in the Pyrénées-Orientales around two thousand hectares, forcing an estimated ten thousand people from their homes. In Spain, fires that broke out on 5 and 6 July in Catalonia affected more than forty thousand people before crews got them under control. In Portugal, the fire at Vouzela in the centre of the country, which burned some twelve thousand hectares, was declared largely controlled on 5 July after more than twelve hundred firefighters, nearly four hundred vehicles and fifteen aircraft worked the lines. The pattern is the same across the three countries: hot air, dry ground, and vegetation that has been drying since spring.

The conditions were set months ago. Europe entered the summer with a drought already in place, and the June heatwave that broke temperature records across the continent did what a heatwave does to a landscape: it pulled the remaining moisture out of the soil and left the vegetation ready to burn. The European Forest Fire Information System has this year’s burn area running above the long-term average, although below the exceptional total of 2025, when the EU lost more than a million hectares, the worst on record. The difference is that last year’s record was treated as an anomaly, while this year’s early fires look like the season simply starting earlier.

The fires are also arriving in places that have not traditionally built their firefighting systems around them. The big blazes this week are in southwestern France, Catalonia and central Portugal, the usual suspects. But the fire risk maps have been spreading north and west for years, and the same dry ground that fuels the Mediterranean fires now extends into regions where the forests are managed for timber and tourism rather than for fire. A fire service is built around the fires a region has had; the gap between that design and the fires a region is now getting is where the surprises come from.

The immediate response has worked, in the narrow sense that the flames have been contained in most places within days. France requested international help through the EU’s civil protection mechanism, which is exactly what the mechanism is for, and aircraft from several countries have rotated through. The evacuation of forty thousand people from coastal France last summer, and ten thousand from the Pyrénées-Orientales this week, happened without the loss of life that used to accompany such events. None of that changes the arithmetic underneath: a hectare of pine forest is cheaper to protect than a town, and a town is cheaper to protect than a life, but the cheapest of all is to have the fire never start, and that part of the budget is always the first to be cut.

The politics of this summer will be shaped by what comes next. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called on the parties to treat the fire season as a climate issue rather than a seasonal emergency, and the World Weather Attribution network has already concluded that the conditions behind the current fires were made substantially more likely by human-caused warming. The fires will keep coming through the summer; the question is whether the response is rebuilt between them, or only during them. Portugal is already looking at the rest of the season with the bulk of its firefighting capacity deployed. The months that matter for a fire season are the ones before it starts, when the fuel is cleared and the crews are rested and the budgets are still flexible.

The Atlantic coast of France, where the biggest fires of 2025 destroyed tens of thousands of hectares in the Landes, is under close watch again. The Gironde and the Landes have burned in three of the last four summers. If the pattern holds, the summer of 2026 will be remembered less for any single fire than for the fact that none of them, this year, will count as a surprise.