Spain has been having it hot as some 300 firefighters have spent a difficult night in the process of trying to battle a huge wildfire which had occurred in the southeastern part of Spain which had has burnt through nearly 10,000 hectares in an area notoriously difficult to access.
The fire had been reportedly started when lightning had hit the Vall de Ebo area in the province of Alicante late Saturday and has since spread quite rapidly around the surroundings while being fuelled by strong winds, forcing the evacuation of more than 1,000 people, Valencia’s regional government said.
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“At the moment, we are talking about more than 9,500 hectares (235,000 acres) burnt with a perimeter of 65 kilometres (40 miles),” regional president Ximo Puig said late Monday, describing the blaze as “absolutely huge”.
“It’s a very complicated situation… The fire is creating enormous difficulties that are absolutely impossible to tackle with the speed we would like.”
Regional interior minister Gabriela Bravo told Antena 3 television some 300 firefighters were battling the flames, backed by 24 planes and helicopters. Firefighters elsewhere in the region were also battling two other wildfires north of Valencia city, with hundreds of firefighters and at least 10 firefighting planes engaged in the operation, officials said.
Further north, firefighters in the Aragon region were battling another major blaze that broke out Saturday and has burnt more than 6,000 hectares of land, forcing at least 1,500 people from their homes.
More than 1,200 firefighters had been drafted in to tackle the blaze, which has already consumed some 15,000 hectares and was “burning fiercely” with the flames whipped up by strong winds, the authority said.
So far this year, Spain has suffered 391 wildfires, fuelled by scorching temperatures and drought conditions, which have destroyed a total of 271,020 hectares of land, according to the latest figures from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).
This year’s fires in Spain have been particularly devastating, destroying more than three times the area consumed by wildfires in the whole of 2021, which amounted to 84,827 hectares, the figures show.
Portugal has suffered 195 wildfires so far this year, which have ravaged 84,717 hectares of land, EFFIS figures show.
