Forest fires have calcined almost 64,000 hectares in Spain this year during the first seven months, which is the third highest figure in the last decade.
According to the provisional data provided by the autonomous communities to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, the area burned by the fire between January 1 and July 30 of this year amounted to 63,802.52 hectares, when the average of the last decade is 61,242 hectares.
The figure for these first months of 2023 is the highest in the decade, only behind the periods from January to July 2022 (162,706.72 hectares) and 2017 (72,177.73). Instead, the best are still 2018 (11,494.04), 2016 (18,673.41) and 2013 (21,231.63).
Although the burned hectares in the middle of last year already set off all the alarms, at the end of the year 2022 was recorded as the worst year of the century. Without going any further, of all the hectares burned in Europe last year, almost 40% belonged to Spain.
The northwest of the peninsula (Asturias, Cantabria, Galicia, the Basque Country and the provinces of León and Zamora) concentrated 44.54% of the fires and forest attempts between January 1 and July 30, while the rest of the accidents they were distributed among the interior communities (specifically, the provinces of the non-coastal regions, except León and Zamora), with 32.09%; the Mediterranean, with 22.83%, and the Canary Islands, with 0.54%.
Regarding the forest area destroyed by fire, 62.66% belongs to the northwest; 24.23%, to interior communities; 8.24% to the Mediterranean area, and 4.86% to the Canary Islands. On the other hand, the largest amount of wooded area destroyed by fire occurred in the interior communities (40.79%), ahead of the northwest (29.71%), the Mediterranean area (16.38%) and the Canary Islands (13 ,eleven%).
