The fires that broke out over the past week in France and Spain, which have already burned more than 115,000 hectares and forced more than 320,000 people from their homes, have stood out for the sheer ferocity and scale of the flames. The French authorities acknowledge that they may take months to put them out.
They are the latest examples of what the operational and scientific community began calling, from the second half of the 2010s onwards, "sixth-generation fires", especially after the blazes in Pedrógão Grande in Portugal (2017) and in Greece (2018), each of which claimed more than 100 lives.
This new pattern first became more evident in Europe, although it was also detected in 2017 in Chile, where it reappeared, in even more devastating form, in 2024, a year in which 137 people lost their lives. The same features have also been observed elsewhere, notably in Australia (2019-20), on the west coast of the United States (2020) and in Canada (2023).
The major change in fire behaviour is being driven by climate change, explains Domingos Xavier Viegas to Euronews, a professor at the University of Coimbra's Faculty of Science and Technology (FCTUC) and a specialist in rural fires. With higher temperatures, less rainfall and lower humidity, the soil and vegetation become drier, which greatly increases the "conditions for ignition" and the "area available to burn".
