Why is Spain's wildfire season getting so deadly? A 2026 explainer

The wildfire in Los Gallardos

A fast-spreading wildfire broke out on Thursday afternoon in the municipality of Los Gallardos in Spain’s south-eastern province of Almería, in the region of Andalucía. By Friday morning the regional government said at least 12 people had been killed and 23 others remained unaccounted for, making it one of the deadliest wildfires Spain has recorded in recent years. The blaze was still active when emergency minister Antonio Sanz gave a press briefing, describing it as a “terrible and very complex fire” that was “spreading very fast”.

The victims were found not in the village of Bédar, which the fire ultimately did not reach, but in a ravine outside it. According to Sanz, four people died in a right-hand-drive vehicle that authorities believe belonged to British nationals, and another seven died after abandoning their cars and trying to walk out along a route that was not the official evacuation path. Eight people were injured, four of them seriously, and the Guardia Civil set up a station in nearby La Garrucha to collect DNA samples to identify the dead and trace the missing. The regional government said 800 people had been evacuated, with nearly 200 housed in emergency shelters.

The heatwave fuelling it

The fire has broken out during what Spanish authorities have confirmed is Spain’s second heatwave of summer 2026. Andalucía’s regional president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla of the conservative People’s party (PP), said vegetation was “very dry due to the heatwaves” and that combined with wind the conditions were “a ticking timebomb”. By Friday morning 150 firefighters and 220 soldiers from Spain’s military emergencies unit (UME) were deployed to the area, while the regional emergency minister warned that efforts to bring in heavy machinery were being hindered by “terrible” topography and limited access.

The British foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the UK was “in close contact with the Spanish authorities” and “stand[ing] ready to support those affected”, urging any British nationals in the area to follow official advice. The mayor of Los Gallardos, Francisco Miguel Reyes Martín, told Cadena Ser radio that residents had never experienced a fire as destructive locally: “It looks like a bomb has gone off in our municipality.” Authorities said they believe the blaze may have been caused by a fallen power line, though this had not been confirmed at the time of reporting.

How Spain fights — and politicked — the fire

Within hours of the death toll emerging, the tragedy became the trigger for a partisan clash between Andalucía’s PP-led regional government and Spain’s central socialist-led administration. The PP’s secretary general, Miguel Tellado, said “Spain needs better public services across all areas – especially to prevent and tackle tragedies like the one we’ve suffered in Almería today,” accusing the central government of having “abandoned” crisis management. Spain’s transport minister Óscar Puente hit back on X, writing: “Is this shameless piece of trash blaming the Spanish government for the Almería fire and its consequences? When they cut back on firefighting personnel, which is their responsibility?”

Under Spain’s devolved system, regional governments — not Madrid — hold responsibility for preventing and managing wildfires and for drawing up emergency response plans. That division of responsibility matters because it frames who can be held to account for preparedness decisions such as controlled burns, vegetation clearance, firebreak maintenance and the issuing of mobile-phone alerts; the central government in Madrid focuses on civil protection coordination across regions during declared national emergencies.

Why it matters

A single Iberian wildfire killing more than ten people in a single evening is an outlier event in modern Spanish records, and the geography of the deaths — civilians fleeing in cars or on foot into a ravine, rather than people caught in their homes — raises sharp practical questions about evacuation routing, signage and the advice given to residents and foreign visitors who do not speak Spanish. The British presence in the casualty list, while not yet finally identified, is a reminder that Almería’s inland hills are also an expatriate and tourist zone, meaning emergency messaging has to work across languages. Wider than that, Spain’s second heatwave of the summer landing while vegetation is already desiccated points to a much shorter, more dangerous window between ignition and conflagration than firefighters were trained for in earlier decades, raising the political stakes for whoever is responsible for each stage of the chain.

The bigger picture

The Almería fire is not happening in isolation. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed that Western Europe has just recorded its hottest June on record, with C3S deputy director Dr Samantha Burgess stating that the month “underscored how profoundly the climate is changing” and warning of “increasingly intense heatwaves, a persistently warm ocean, and growing risks for people, ecosystems and infrastructure.” More than 3,700 excess deaths were recorded across France, the Netherlands and Belgium during that June heatwave — a figure that C3S has warned is probably an underestimate. Meanwhile, researchers at the US National Weather Service said there is now an 81% chance that a “very strong” El Niño event — one that could rank among the largest since records began in 1950 — will develop before the end of 2026, with a 97% probability that El Niño conditions persist through spring 2027.

El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon in which sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean warm well above average, shifting jet streams and precipitation patterns globally. Climate scientist Daniel Swain said the conditions observed in 2026 are “as strong or stronger than we’ve ever seen before” for the calendar date. A so-called “super El Niño” — sea-surface temperatures at least 2°C above average — would tend to bring drought and heat to southern and central Africa, parts of India and Australia, and the Amazon, while steering heavy precipitation at the southern tier of the United States, parts of the Middle East and south-central Asia. Its effects would “layer on top of impacts already being fueled by the climate crisis.”

Where the reporting diverges

The hard factual core of the Almería story is consistent across reporting: the death toll, the location near Los Gallardos and Bédar, the deployment of UME soldiers, and the working theory that a fallen power line may have started the fire. Where coverage diverges is in framing responsibility. The PP argues that central government under-investment is the underlying cause; the central government’s socialists counter that regional fire-prevention budgets and personnel were cut in Andalucía, and that no emergency mobile alert was sent. The Guardian notes that, under Spain’s devolved constitution, it is regional governments that hold direct statutory responsibility for wildfire prevention, so the central government’s rebuttal is supported by the legal architecture of the state. Readers should expect that, as DNA confirmation proceeds and the final casualty list is published, the political battle will harden rather than soften.

What to watch next

Three concrete milestones will shape how this story reads in the days ahead. First, the Guardia Civil’s DNA work in La Garrucha will move the 23 “unaccounted for” figure toward a confirmed final toll — a number that is almost certain to change, possibly in either direction, before the fire is fully contained. Second, the investigation into whether a fallen power line caused the blaze will narrow into either an attribution to grid operator Endesa or a regional electrical distributor, or into an alternative ignition source such as agricultural burning or lightning. Third, meteorologists will be watching whether Spain’s third heatwave of the summer develops in late July, and whether Andalucía’s regional government — facing elections and a public inquiry pressure — revises its wildfire-prevention plans before the 2027 fire season. For international readers, the relevant multiplier is climate: with a likely super El Niño superimposed on a record-hot European baseline, fire authorities from Lisbon to Athens will be treating the rest of 2026 as an unusually high-risk window.