Fire and Brimstone
The TV news, the radio or just keeping up with social media will tell you that Spain is on fire. It’s not a new story. By 23 July, more than 120,000 hectares had been turned into charred wasteland. Last year, by the same date, the figure was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares. In other words, this year’s fires have already burned four or five times as much land as they had by this stage in 2025, and that’s despite last year eventually becoming Spain’s worst fire season since 1994. Figures measured in hectares don’t really mean much to most of us. A hectare is what you need to put up a house in the campo in Alicante province, but visualising 7,000 of those plots is beyond my imagination. The deadliest fire so far this year, around Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, destroyed around 7,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Leicester or Derby. Meanwhile, the huge fires in Zaragoza and Guadalajara have each burned more than 30,000 hectares, making each of them larger...