The summer Europe discovered extreme wildfires / Europe / Areas / Homepage

Fires, even extreme ones, usually have a banal trigger: a cigarette butt, an out-of-control farm fire, an arsonist. The fire on June 17th did not. Lightning, according to a contested reconstruction, struck a power line.

At first, the fire advanced slowly, invisible in the damp vegetation of the Ribeira de Frades stream. Having reached the hill, the residents of Escalos Fundeiros, seeing the smoke, called the fire department at 2:39 PM. By 3:00 PM, the first planes were already in the air.

Meanwhile, three kilometers away, on the same power line, a second fire was breaking out, soon to join the first: an extremely rare “double ignition.” Meanwhile, in nearby Góis, a third, enormous fire was raging, which would keep rescuers busy for days and eventually reach the now-charred area around Pedrógão.

“In the end, how it started matters little,” explains Fernandes. “The difference was made by the conditions, which were extreme that year.” After two years of drought, the spring had been the driest in 80 years. In June, a heat wave brought temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius and made the atmosphere unstable. “The Fire Weather Index was at its highest since we’ve been measuring it. And in fact, that was one of the harshest seasons ever.”

For the first few hours, the fire grew gradually. Then, around 6 p.m., everything changed. “It was spreading southward,” says Fernandes. “Then a gust of easterly wind, linked to a thunderstorm, made it veer 90 degrees.” The flames were already advancing at about a kilometer an hour, at the limit of the theoretical ability to control it. The front was long, and the wind hit it full-force.

“That’s when the fire became the monster we know.” The gusts carried incandescent fragments far away and fueled a column of smoke and boiling air, visible from space. The pyrocumulonimbus cloud rose over 12 kilometers, generating ice, lightning, and triggering thunderstorms.

Around 8:00 PM, the column collapsed: a “downburst,” an extremely rare event in Europe. Within minutes, a shower of incandescent projections, driven by violent winds, increased the speed of the fire tenfold. Witnesses described it as an “explosion.”

It was at that stage that the most tragic part of the fire unfolded: most of the 66 victims lost their lives in those moments. More than half were on the EN 236-1 road, near Barraca da Boavista, trying to escape by car or on foot. A firefighter was among the victims.

The next day, the fire continued to rage, albeit without the intensity of the previous evening, affecting Figueiró dos Vinhos and Castanheira de Pera. Only on the 19th, thanks to better weather and over 1,400 rescuers, was it gradually brought under control. However, the front had already joined forces with the one originating from Góis, which would continue to burn until the 22nd.

But the extreme season in Pinhal was not over. Between October 14th and 19th, persistent drought and the winds of Hurricane Ophelia sparked new devastating fires, spanning nearly 300,000 hectares, with another 51 victims. It was clear: this was not an isolated incident.

The landscape of Pedrógão is made up of forests and hills, cut by the Zêzere River, which here flows into an artificial lake. Residents live in isolated settlements, surrounded by eucalyptus and pine trees. Half a century ago, the area was inhabited by farmers; today, the population has halved. Many have emigrated. Elderly people remain in the villages, and a glimpse of life can only be seen on weekends.

Many landowners, with small, unprofitable plots, have abandoned their fields or converted them to eucalyptus, a profitable but flammable species. Monocultures – especially eucalyptus, which regenerates after each fire – among the main risk factors. The absence of the working population, who used to manage the forest, has done the rest.

Since 2006, clearing the areas around residential areas has become mandatory, but until 2017, the rule was often disregarded. “There was a lot of combustible material accumulated,” Fernandes recalls. “But back then, there was even more elsewhere.”

Despite their experience with fires, the residents of the villages that died on Highway 236-1 had never seen anything like it, and they decided to flee, especially since the authorities did not provide clear warnings. Had they stayed, they probably would have survived: the fire only reached a third of their homes.

According to Fernandes, with the knowledge available at the time, acting differently would have been difficult, but not impossible. “The window of opportunity for warning was very short. We needed people with real expertise in fire meteorology, capable of making quick decisions. Unlike the United States or Australia, Europe wasn’t ready.”

Mistakes occurred at every stage. Rather than failures, Fernandes believes that they were due to a lack of awareness of the new nature of the fires. “The nearest watchtower wasn’t active: it was the beginning of the season, but conditions were already critical. Local firefighters thought it was a normal fire, but strategic decisions were up to Lisbon. And without awareness, responses are slow and inadequate.”

The Pinhal residents did not need scholars to understand that they were entering an era of extreme fires. For many, says anthropologist Filipa Soares, the need for a change of pace was apparent during the emergency: “The eucalyptus trees burned like matches, while the fire stopped before the oaks. They realized something was wrong.”

More than ten affected localities have launched projects to make the land more resilient. Around many villages, strawberry trees, oaks, and chestnut trees have replaced the eucalyptus. In Ferraria de São João, a community herd of goats is returning to grazing, reducing biomass and producing cheese. This is the “FarmReal” project, based on an online platform for virtually adopting animals.

The new practices are framed within the Village Protection Zones, managed as commons.

But things have not always gone smoothly. “Many landowners have opposed it, and some developers have been threatened,” Soares says. The crux of the matter is economic sustainability. “The projects have received public funding and donations, but attention is now waning.” The issue of long-term incentives to revitalize rural areas is central to the Fire-Res project, but it remains difficult to implement.

The 2017 disaster prompted a wealth of studies to improve forecasting, map fuel, analyze the “perfect mosaic,” and projects, like Fire-Res, that aim to integrate all aspects of risk management.

Portugal has made progress: it has created a new agency for integrated management and a national fire prevention plan praised by the United Nations. “It’s an advanced plan, but almost everything has remained on paper. Civil defense, forestry, and the military are still operating independently. We certainly have more resources, but not much more technical capacity or applied expertise.”

Meanwhile, the woods around the memorial to the 2017 victims, bordering an artificial lake with a symbolic fountain, are growing again, thin but unstoppable.

“Every now and then you see a large burned tree, but it’s hard to see what’s happened. Everything is going back to how it was before: homogeneous and abandoned,” sighs Fernandes. “There are laudable initiatives, but scalable processes are still lacking. If something doesn’t change, within a few years Pedrógão will be even more at risk than before.”