Patricia Lamela was driving back to the Galician town of Larouco in northwest Spain when she got the call. It was Au
g. 13, just before 7 p.m., and a neighbor told her there was a fire in the forest.
Lamela, the mayor of Larouco, wasn’t surprised by the news. The area around her small village of less than 500 resid
ents had been baking at temperatures above 40C (104F) for over two weeks amid one of the longest and hottest he
at waves on record in Spain. Weeds and bushes that had thrived during
a particularly wet spring dried up and became fuel to the fire. The abs
ence of people cleaning and maintaining the forest in one of Spain’s least populated regions meant a large blaze was only a matter of time.
With her hand still on the steering wheel, Lamela notified regional authorities and asked for help. Then, she called the c
lerk to get the town’s only fire truck ready and asked a nephew to post a message on the village’s WhatsApp group calling for volunteers.
“For the first few hours, it was just us neighbors and our truck,” she said. “The regional government and their resources were fighting fires elsewhere.”
Within hours the Larouco fire became the biggest on record in Galicia, burning through more than 300 square kilomete
rs (116 square miles). The town was not alone in its misery, as dozens of similar blazes were erupting across Spain an
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Portugal over mid-August, overwhelming authorities and leaving officials struggling to coordinate extinguish
ng efforts across dozens of agencies and departments, according to multiple accounts by local politicians, fire
fighters and neighbors who all fought the flames themselves.
Beyond the Iberian Peninsula, it’s been a similar tale of destruction in Europe. This year more than 1,900 wildfires have s
parked across the European Union, scorching a record 9,860 square kilometers — an area larger than Cyprus, accordin
g to satellite estimates from the EU’s European Forest Fire Information System.
Climate change is playing a major role in the endless scenes of smoke and fire. Europe is the world’s faste
st-warming continent, and the searing heat and drought that fueled this summer’s blazes will intensify in the c
oming decades, setting the stage once again for strong winds to fan flames and spread fires. Yet global warming is only part of the story: a lack of coordination bet
een agencies, fragmented land ownership and under-resourced fire services also turned many outbreaks into uncontrollable blazes. While some countries like
Greece have begun to demonstrate how major investment in monitoring and firefighting equipment can so
ften the worst outcomes, Europe still faces risks ahead as the world continues to break new temperature records.
For Galicia, one of Europe’s most fire-prone regions, this summer overturned long-held assumptions about how blazes behave. As Lamela explai
ned, fires had always raced uphill in her town, not down. Volunteers believed that if they protected the village at the b
ottom of the valley, they would be safe. The flames were expected to burn through the forest and stop at the ridge, buying time for regional crews to arrive and put them out.
On Aug. 13 that didn’t happen. The flames continued to climb the incline before wild winds caused the fire’s path to move unpredictably.
“That fire had a weird behavior the whole time,” Lamela said. “First it went up, and then it crossed the ridge and went down at incredible speed toward [the village of] Freixido.”