At least 11 die in southern Spain wildfire as heat wave rages

At least 11 people died when a wildfire tore through southern Spain’s Almería province, leaving 19 people missing and at least eight injured as firefighters and soldiers fought to stop the blaze from spreading farther through Andalusia.

The fire broke out near the hamlet of Bédar and Los Gallardos, where authorities said several victims were found inside burnt-out vehicles. Regional officials said four British nationals appeared to be among the dead, and emergency crews spent Friday trying to reach scorched roads and rural properties as traffic was closed in the area. Around 150 firefighters were on the line, backed by about 220 soldiers from Spain’s Military Emergency Unit, in one of the country’s largest recent wildfire deployments.

The blaze erupted under a heat wave that pushed temperatures close to 40C, with conditions that European fire-risk forecasters had already flagged as extremely dangerous across southern Spain in early July. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, using the European Forest Fire Information System, had warned that very extreme wildfire conditions would dominate a large stretch of western and central Europe, with the heaviest concentration across France, Spain and northern Portugal. Spain’s civil protection authorities had also been warning in the days before the fire about high temperatures and wildfire danger.

The death toll put the fire among Spain’s deadliest on record and revived comparisons with the 2005 Guadalajara fire, which killed 11 members of a firefighting team. Juanma Moreno, the leader of Andalusia, and Antonio Sanz, the region’s emergency official, described the situation as grave as crews pressed a major containment operation in difficult terrain. The scale of the evacuations, the number of missing people and the victims found in vehicles underscored how quickly fast-moving fires can overrun rural escape routes, particularly when extreme heat, dry fuels and wind combine.

The wildfire was not an isolated catastrophe but a sign of a harder fire season taking shape across Europe. Heat waves across the continent have raised the risk of large, fast-moving blazes, and the Almería fire showed how evacuation systems and land management are now being tested by fire behavior that can outrun local response in minutes rather than hours.