Spain counts the cost of ‘nightmare’ wildfire summer

José Antonio Bruña, a honey producer, is standing on a hillside where he keeps his beehives near the small Spanish village of Porto de Sanabria.

He points to the exact spot, a few hundred metres away on the mountain opposite, where lightning struck a few weeks earlier, igniting a wildfire that had disastrous consequences.

“This August has been a nightmare for me personally, but also for the local farmers and everyone here in the village,” he says. “I’m 47 and I’ve never seen a fire that fierce.”

It ended up burning more than 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of land and causing thousands of people to be evacuated from villages in this farming-heavy corner of north-western Spain, near the Portuguese border.

But it was just one of several vast blazes which have devastated Spain this summer, burning 0.8% of the country’s surface area.

The most heavily affected zones were here in the north-west, including the regions of Castilla y León and Galicia, plus the western region of Extremadura.