Over a fortnight, fires in northern Portugal and north-west Spain tore through forests and protected areas, forcing mass evacuations and charring landscapes from Galicia to Castile and León. By late August, burnt area across Spain and Portugal had reached roughly 640,000 hectares – about four times the size of Greater London and close to 1% of the peninsula’s land surface – according to figures cited by researchers and European monitoring agencies. Spain alone had seen around 380,000 hectares burn since January, placing 2025 among the worst years since records began. Portugal, proportionally Europe’s most fire-affected nation, has likewise endured an extreme