Hundreds of firefighters and emergency workers were still battling a deadly wildfire on Saturday in southern Spain that has killed at least 12 people, officials said.
The fire is already one of the deadliest on record in Spain, and 23 people were still missing as of Saturday afternoon. Most of those confirmed to have been killed were foreigners.
More than 1,400 people were forced to flee their homes, said Antonio Sanz Cabello, the health minister in the region of Andalusia. They crowded into sports halls or stayed in hotels.
Searing heat waves in parts of Europe this summer have created the dry, hot conditions that are like tinder for dangerous wildfires. Despite lower temperatures on Saturday, the Forest Fire Extinction Service of Andalusia warned that the risk of more wildfires remained very high.
Here’s what you need to know.
How did the blaze start?
“This is a very tough and complex fire,” Juanma Moreno, the president of the region of Andalusia, said on Friday.
It began on Thursday afternoon as a “small urban fire,” ignited by a broken cable in a roadside ditch in the municipality of Los Gallardos, in Spain’s southeastern Andalusia region, Mr. Moreno said. Firefighters rushed to extinguish it, but strong winds whipped up the flames, spreading it nearly 10 miles in just two hours, he said.
By Saturday, the fire had ravaged roughly 16,000 acres of woodland, and many hillsides were still smoldering. About 400 firefighters, including military reinforcements, tried to contain the fire overnight. By morning, they were still working on the left flank and head of the wildfire, according to the region’s health ministry.
How many people have been affected?
Nearly all of the confirmed dead were foreigners, including from Belgium and Britain, according to Mr. Moreno.
Four victims, found inside a right-hand drive vehicle, were believed to be British, the regional health ministry said. The Belgian Foreign Ministry said in an email on Friday that an unspecified number of Belgians were still missing after the fire.
Isabelle Weyn and her husband, Stefan Broods, two Belgians who owned a bed-and-breakfast in Bédar, a hamlet in the fire’s path, recalled their fear in a video message sent on Friday to The New York Times.
“Our casa is completely on fire,” Mr. Broods said in the video. Then, he urged his wife to drive: “Otherwise, we’re finished. Think about it, we’re dead.”
The couple said they fled by car after a police evacuation order.
The authorities are still working to understand how the blaze came to be so deadly. As the wildfire spread on Friday, emergency workers rushed to alert residents scattered across farms and villages, going door-to-door. Some were told to shelter in place, while others were instructed to evacuate along designated routes.
“They were given directions based on their location and what was safest for them, but some, unfortunately, seem to have ignored them,” said Mr. Moreno, the regional leader.
Ángel Collado, the mayor of Bédar, said that at least one resident had refused to leave and advised a separate group of nine people to remain indoors. As the fire advanced on the hamlet, the group fled along a route different than the evacuation path recommended by the authorities.
That path ended in a cul-de-sac on a farm, creating “a trap,” the regional health minister, Mr. Sanz, told journalists. Seven people in the group died, the mayor said.
Is there a wider risk of wildfires?
Much of Europe has faced a series of searing heat waves this summer, and forecasters have warned that the relentless hot weather is creating an unprecedented danger of wildfires in some countries.
The wildfire in Andalusia sped across parched vegetation, at times at a rate of 328 feet per minute, Félix Bolaños, Spain’s deputy prime minister, said on a visit to the region.
“We are experiencing wildfires in our country unlike anything we have seen before,” he told reporters. “Climate change, the climate emergency, is evident.”
In France, over 8,000 fires have burned nearly 100 square miles so far this year — roughly double the area at the same time last year, according to Julien Marion, the head of France’s civil protection and crisis management agency.
A wildfire in the Pyrenees mountain range area of France, on the border with Spain, forced more than 10,000 people to evacuate from their homes, the authorities said on Monday.
Very extreme fire weather conditions cover a broad swath of western and central Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System, particularly across France, Spain and Portugal, Central Europe around the Alps and the southern British Isles.
Koba Ryckewaert contributed reporting.
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