A forest fire in central Portugal has ravaged an area of some 7,000 hectares. It still mobilized more than a thousand firefighters on Sunday, said civil protection. The country of the Iberian Peninsula is experiencing strong heat.
“The estimate of the burned area 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 personnel who will remain on the ground are at this stage trying to guarantee the stabilization of the fire, the perimeter of which has already reached 60 km“, he said during a press briefing in Proença-a-Nova. “It is a very large area with many isolated dwellings and villages“, he added, specifying that the 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, destroyed some 6,000 hectares in the first 24 hours, civil protection had indicated in a first estimate of the burned area.
The smoke and ashes that emanated from it on Saturday reached the shrine city of Fatima (center) even though Pope Francis had gathered more than 200,000 pilgrims there.
Another outbreak mobilized more than 300 firefighters in Odemira, near the southwestern coast of the country, on Sunday.
Some good news
“The flames give way to the means of combat“, however, said Sunday morning a civil protection official, Tiago Bugio, specifying that two fronts of the fire remained active, but that a third, which was heading south and the tourist region of the Algarve, had been brought under control.
Due to temperatures that could reach 40°C in regions on Sunday, civil protection warned on Saturday that the risk of fire would be “very high or maximum throughout the territory” during “next days“.
In neighboring Spain, a forest fire which burned nearly 600 hectares in Catalonia (North-West), on the border with France, remained under control on Sunday, despite a few recoveries thanks to violent winds, while the Andalusian firefighters managed to control the flames in Bonares, Andalusia (South).
