Spain has burned through nearly 300,000 hectares of land this year, almost half of the EU's entire total

New figures confirm the scale of the 2026 wildfire season, though the pace of destruction has slowed considerably since early September

Nearly 300,000 hectares of Spanish land have been destroyed by wildfires so far in 2026, according to the European Commission's Forest Fire Information System. The figure of 296,815 hectares represents 44.4% of all land burned across the entire European Union this year, which stands at 668,035 hectares in total. To put that in perspective, Spain accounts for nearly half of the EU's fire damage while being one of 27 member states.

The current total is 3.4 times higher than Spain's annual average of 87,212 hectares, calculated across the two decades from 2006 to 2025. It is a sobering number, though it is worth noting that the Ministry for Ecological Transition puts the figure slightly lower at 272,436 hectares, as the two monitoring systems use different methodologies and criteria.

The fire season peaked brutally in July, with Spain already recording 50,750 hectares burned by July 5, more than double the figure on the same date in the previous year. That month also brought one of the deadliest fires in Spanish history, the Los Gallardos fire in Almería, which claimed 15 lives.

The Niebla fire in Huelva threatened to become the worst environmental disaster in Andalucía's history, while fires continued to break out across the country into September. A fire near Tuéjar in Valencia burned 690 hectares and forced evacuations as recently as last Tuesday.

The one piece of genuinely good news is that the rate of new damage has dropped sharply. Since September 2, just 973 additional hectares have been recorded nationally, and only 313 since September 9. The worst appears to be over for this season.

Spain's cumulative total this year is still considerably lower than at the same point in 2025, when 380,877 hectares had burned by September 2, and that year ultimately ended at 393,079 hectares, the worst figure since 1994.

Spain has recorded 446 individual fires this year. Italy leads Europe with 605 and France follows with 364.

Image: Frank Cone/Pexels