Wildfires across Spain, France and Greece made 2026 one of Europe’s most damaging fire seasons in recent years, with about 699,000 hectares burned and hundreds of thousands of people evacuated.
A major blaze near Burgohondo in central Spain burned roughly 63,000 hectares between July 22 and October 3 and triggered more than 60,000 evacuations. The scale of the damage reflects not only extreme heat but also changes in rural land use: as people leave the countryside, abandoned farmland allows vegetation to accumulate, while fragmented ownership and limited resources can make prevention harder.
The European Investment Bank has doubled its planned climate-adaptation spending to €30 billion as governments face mounting costs from heatwaves, droughts, fires and floods. The growing challenge is to combine emergency response with long-term prevention, including better landscape maintenance and support for rural landowners.
