MADRID: Portugal suffered its first death on Friday from the fires raging there, as Spain’s weather agency warned of a “very high to extreme risk” of more wildfires there during Europe’s intense heatwave.

Further east, Greece was still fighting blazes on one Aegean island, but the situation had improved for several other southern European countries.

Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced the death of the former mayor of the eastern town of Guarda, Carlos Damaso, who had been fighting the fires.

The president said he had cut short his holidays and returned to work, joining a meeting of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority.

For days now, several thousand firefighters have been battling fires in various parts of the country.

Portugal, like Spain, has invoked the EU’s civil protection mechanism to ask for help, requesting four firefighting aircraft to use until Monday, its presidency said on X.

In Spain, three people have died in the fires, including two young volunteers in their thirties who lost their lives trying to extinguish a blaze in the Castile and Leon area.

One of them, Jaime Aparicio Vidales, was buried in the town of Quintanilla de Florez, Zamora province, Castile and Leon, on Friday.

‘Nothing left to burn’

Spain has endured a devastating wildfire season, with 157,501 hectares (389,193 acres) reduced to ashes since the start of the year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Yet that figure is still short of 2022, when more than 306,000 hectares went up in smoke.

On Thursday, France sent two water-bombing planes to help try to douse the flames in the northwestern region, where a dozen fires were still raging.

The railway line between Madrid and the northwestern region of Galicia remained closed, as well as 10 main roads.

Marco Raton, 35, works on a pig farm in Sesnandez de Tabara near one of the fires in Castile and Leon that forced several thousand people to flee their homes.

He and his friends did not think twice when they saw the fire arrive on Tuesday, he said.

Raton had thought there was “nothing left to burn” after devastating fires in the same region in 2022. Now he was convinced that “this will continue to happen to us year after year”.

France on red alert

Meteorologists in France, meanwhile, put the southern department of Aude — where a devastating fire has already killed one person and injured several others — on red alert.

The fire, which broke out on August 5, has still not been fully extinguished and temperatures are expected to reach 40C there on Saturday. “We are in a situation of extreme vigilance,” said Lucie Roesch, general secretary of the local prefecture.

Further east, lower temperatures and reduced winds were helping to improve the situation in Greece and the Balkans, where rain was forecast in many parts of the region.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2025