Relentless heat and raging wildfires continue to ravage southern Europe, with one-quarter of weather stations in Spain recording 40C temperatures, as the prime minister urged people to “leave the climate emergency outside of partisan struggles”.
The Spanish weather agency Aemet recorded a high of 45.8C in Cádiz on Sunday, while one in eight weather stations nationwide hit peaks of at least 42C (108F) . The agency warned of “very high or extreme fire danger” in most of the country in a post on social media on Monday.
“Although the heatwave is starting to subside, very high temperatures will still be reached today in the east and south of the peninsula,” it said. “Be cautious.”
Deadly fires have burned 348,000 hectares in Spain this year, according to preliminary data published by Copernicus on Monday, charring even more land than when the previous record was set in 2022.
A fourth person was killed by the fires in Spain when a firefighting truck overturned on a steep forest road, while in neighbouring Portugal, where 216,000 hectares have burned, another firefighter died, bringing the national death toll to two.
Civil protection authorities in Spain said 31,130 people have been evacuated from their homes in the last week.
The Spanish government said on Sunday that an extra 500 soldiers would join the 1,400 troops trying to bring deadly wildfires under control. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a “state pact” to tackle the climate emergency as he visited Ourense and León, one of the regions engulfed by flames.
“We need a strategy that anticipates a better, more secure and more equitable response for our fellow citizens in the face of the worsening and accelerating effects of the climate emergency in our country,” Sánchez said. “And that requires a great state pact that leaves the climate emergency outside of partisan struggles and ideological issues, where we focus on scientific evidence and act accordingly.”
Sánchez’s proposed pact received a dismissive response from the opposition conservative People’s party (PP), which has called for more troop deployments and accused the prime minister of absenting himself from the crisis.
“State pacts don’t put out the flames, nor do they restore what’s been lost,” said Ester Muñoz, a PP spokesperson. “People were expecting a lot more than a smokescreen designed to save his reputation after he’d gone missing for a week.”
Extreme heat, made hotter by carbon pollution, has fuelled devastating wildfires across southern Europe this month, the latest in a series of disasters exacerbated by climate breakdown amid a continental rollback of green policies.
Data from last week shows the blazes have burned at least 530,000 hectares this year, more than double the average over the past two decades, forcing several overwhelmed governments from Spain to Bulgaria to seek firefighting help from the EU. Portugal activated the EU’s civil protection mechanism on Friday with a request for four Canadair water-bombing planes.
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The prolonged heatwave has broken temperature records across the continent. It is expected to die down in Spain after Monday and subsided in some countries over the weekend.
Météo France, the French national weather agency, said temperatures had fallen on Sunday but the wildfire risk remained high or very high in several southern regions.
“The Mediterranean and south-western departments of the country are experiencing significant drought, which means that vegetation is highly sensitive to fire,” the agency said on Monday. It added that the rise in daytime temperatures had been limited by smoke from the Spanish and Portuguese wildfires, as well as plumes of Saharan sand.
In Portugal, which has been under a state of alert since the start of the month, large rural fires have killed two people and caused several injuries.
The minister for internal affairs, Maria Lúcia Amaral, extended the wildfire alert on Sunday until Tuesday night but left a press conference when journalists tried to ask questions, Portuguese media reported. André Ventura, the head of the far-right Chega party, called for her resignation. “We are reaching the limit of what is acceptable,” he said on Sunday.
In a radio interview on Monday morning, Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, said the fires were unlikely to be brought under control until the heatwave ended later on Monday. “We’re not going to be able to end this situation until the heatwave dies down,” Robles told Cadena Ser. “We’re seeing fires with different characteristics because of climate change.”
She said the Military Emergencies Unit (UME), founded to help deal with disasters, had never faced such challenging conditions. “We’re seeing a fire situation that’s never been seen before. The UME hasn’t seen anything like this since it was established 20 years ago.”