The Portuguese authorities have demanded help from Spain in the face of a fire that has forced the evacuation of hundreds of people.
It was this Friday when the fire broke out in the Castelo Branco district. The strong gusts of wind and high temperatures, added to the fact that it is an area with a lot of vegetation and difficult access for terrestrial means, helped the fire spread rapidly and in just 24 hours burned some 6,000 hectares. The most affected area is that of Proença-a-Nova, a small Portuguese council that is predominantly agricultural and livestock with close ties to the province of Cáceres.
The fire has already devastated an area of ??some 7,000 hectares and this Sunday mobilizes more than a thousand firefighters, reports civil protection as the country experiences a heat wave.
“The estimated area burned is 7,000 hectares, but the potential of this fire is estimated at more than 20,000 hectares,” said the commander of the emergency services in charge of operations, José Guilherme.
“The more than a thousand operational troops that will remain on the ground are at this stage trying to guarantee the stabilization of the fire, whose perimeter already reaches 60 km,” he specified during a press conference in Proença-a-Nova.
“It’s a very large area with many isolated houses and villages,” he explained, adding that firefighters were focusing their efforts on four hot spots from which the flames were likely to start again.
This forest fire, which broke out on Friday in the town of Castelo Branco, devastated some 6,000 hectares in the first 24 hours, Civil Protection had indicated in a first estimate of the burned area. The satellite image offered by Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation and monitoring program, gives an idea of ??the magnitude of the fire.
The smoke and ashes that emanated from it on Saturday reached the sanctuary city of Fatima (in the center of the country), where Pope Francis had gathered more than 200,000 pilgrims.
Another outbreak mobilized this Sunday more than 300 firefighters in Odemira, near the southwest coast of the country.
Due to the temperatures that today could reach 40°C in several Portuguese regions, Civil Protection warned yesterday Saturday that the risk of fire would be “very high or maximum throughout the territory” during the “next few days”.
