Smoke and ashes in early spring. The fire has engulfed more than 40,300 hectares of forest in Spain in the last month, the highest figure since records were kept. In the middle of March, in Castellón, a mass of dry air and wind gusts of up to 70 kilometers pushed the flames to destroy more than 4,700 hectares of forest punished by drought. Around 1,500 residents of the Alto Mijares region abandoned their homes as the flames approached.
This black March heralds the end of the fire season as it was known. The limits of the period in which they normally concentrated, from June to September, are increasingly blurred. The risk of wildfire extends from early spring to late fall and even into winter, experts warn.
The flames of this last month not only break the historical record for this time of year but also place it as the worst March since 2003, when the series of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) began.
The more than 40,300 hectares burned this year are equivalent to five times the Collserola park, in Barcelona, ​​or 26 times that of Casa de Campo, in Madrid. The fact that more forest area burns in a single March than is burned on average during a month of the fire season is another demonstration of the seasonality of the fire season. In the last 10 years, summers have burned an average of 18,800 hectares per month.
“The fire campaign as such has ceased to exist. “Now we are campaigning all year round, even in winter,” explains Juan Camaño, a forest fire operations technician and head of the knowledge exchange area of ​​the Pau Costa Foundation, in a telephone interview.
The meteorological phenomena that have led to the Castellón fire—the lack of accumulated rainfall, high temperatures, and low relative humidity—are not new. “What is new is that these phenomena are becoming more frequent and remain longer in the territory, also outside of summer,” adds the technician from Pau Costa, a non-profit organization that works for the prevention and management of forest fires.
While the flames were advancing in Castellón, in Asturias a wave of arson of up to 120 simultaneous outbreaks has overwhelmed the Principality’s response capacity. On the Cantabrian coast and Galicia, the traditional culture linked to fire makes traditional rural burnings of the remains of agricultural and livestock activities common.
On the other hand, the one in Castellón is the first high-intensity fire of the year 2023. It was so virulent that the president of the Valencian Generalitat, Ximo Puig, and the one in Aragón, Javier Lambán, came to describe it as a sixth generation fire or mega-fire .
Despite the fact that this term is used to demand more resources for forest management from the media, the Pau Costa Foundation explains that it is not a sixth generation fire.
For now, none of the fires in Spain is comparable to the mega-fires that have been recorded in other countries with a climate very similar to the Mediterranean in the last five years. Sixth generation fires are very intense fires, related to climate change, that modify their meteorological environment on a very large scale to keep up with the rate of combustion and are very difficult to predict.
It first occurred in hot weather in January 2017 in Chile. It was repeated in June of that same year in Portugal, when a 53,000-hectare fire killed 66 people. It happened again between June 2019 and 2020 in Australia, with more than 10 million hectares burned and 50 deaths. And in the summer of 2020 in California, with more than 417,000 hectares burned and 23 deaths.
Despite the fact that both the Alto Mijares and the Sierra Bermeja fires, during September 2022 on the Costa del Sol, were high-intensity fires, neither of them had the capacity to modify their meteorological environment on a larger scale. “In Spain there have not yet been any, but we have the conditions for it to happen at any time,” says Camaño.
