Death toll rises to 12 as wildfire in southern Spain ranks among nation’s deadliest on record

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez offered condolences to the families of those killed and said he felt profound sadness over the scale of the devastation.

A wildfire tearing through southern Spain has killed at least 12 people and left 19 others missing, with firefighters still working on Friday to contain one of the deadliest blazes the country has recorded.

Antonio Sanz, head of emergencies for the Andalusia region, said most of the victims appeared to be foreign nationals who ignored instructions to shelter in place and instead attempted to flee by car as flames spread rapidly through wooded terrain near the town of Los Gallardos in Almeria province. Only one Spaniard was among the dead. The area draws large numbers of holidaymakers and long term foreign residents, particularly from France, Britain and Belgium.

Sanz said four people died inside a single vehicle that appeared to belong to British nationals, based on its right hand steering wheel configuration. Investigators found seven additional victims after they apparently abandoned their vehicles and tried to escape on foot along a route that fell outside the official evacuation plan. Sanz said the consequences have proven devastating, and that nearly all of the confirmed dead appear to be foreign nationals.

The tragedy echoes a wildfire disaster in neighboring Portugal in June 2017, when a massive blaze during a severe heatwave killed more than 60 people and injured dozens more. In that earlier disaster, roughly half the victims burned to death inside their cars while attempting to flee.

Spain’s wildfire season has started unusually early this year after a series of heatwaves swept across the country in early summer, drying out vast stretches of vegetation and leaving the landscape vulnerable to even small sparks. Data from the European Forest Fire Information System shows that fires have already consumed approximately 57,000 hectares across Spain this year, a figure representing roughly half the annual average recorded over the past two decades. That total also accounts for 40 percent of all land burned across the European Union so far this year.

Last year brought Spain’s worst wildfire season in three decades after a record breaking heatwave struck in August, ultimately burning through 330,000 hectares, an area roughly twice the size of London. Roman Garcia, a forest firefighter based in Salamanca, told state broadcaster TVE that fires like this one traditionally do not appear until August, but he explained that vegetation now dries out earlier in the year, pushing the start of fire season forward.

As emergency crews worked to identify victims and locate missing residents, worried family members from multiple countries turned to social media and local community forums for information. One woman posted that her daughter, who had been driving a red Ford Fiesta with her dog in the car, remained unaccounted for. A woman in the United States said her brother had joined a group of ten people attempting to escape through a valley near a stream, and she shared location coordinates while asking emergency services to search the area.

Pedro Ridao, mayor of the nearby town of Antas, told TVE that officials initially believed the fire started after a power cable came loose and fell onto dry scrubland on Thursday. A spokesperson for the utility company Endesa later ruled out that explanation, saying technicians who inspected the cable found that it carried no electrical current at the time. Ridao said strong winds during the afternoon caused the fire to spread rapidly, and that crews watched the blaze race across the landscape, consuming farmhouses, vacation homes and vehicles as it advanced.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez offered condolences to the families of those killed and said he felt profound sadness over the scale of the devastation.

The rising death toll makes this Spain’s deadliest wildfire since 2005, when a blaze sparked by a barbecue killed 11 firefighters in the central province of Guadalajara. That earlier disaster prompted sweeping reforms to the country’s wildfire prevention strategies and emergency response protocols, changes that authorities are now expected to revisit given the scale of the current tragedy.

Emergency services across Andalusia continue coordinating search and rescue efforts alongside investigators working to determine the fire’s precise origin and establish a definitive account of how it spread so quickly through a region that many foreign residents call home for part of the year. Officials have not yet released a timeline for containing the blaze fully, though authorities say weather conditions in the coming days will play a major role in determining how quickly crews can bring it under control.

The disaster has renewed scrutiny of evacuation procedures in rural and semi rural areas popular with foreign residents, particularly regarding how quickly warnings reach non Spanish speakers and whether existing evacuation routes account for the presence of large expatriate communities. Regional officials have signaled that a full review of the emergency response will follow once search operations conclude and the fire is fully extinguished.