A firefighter was killed when his truck overturned in northwestern Spain, authorities said Monday, raising the death toll from more than a week of wildfires across the country to four.
The firefighter and truck involved in the crash were part of the operation battling blazes in the region of Castilla and Leon, the regional government said on X, as Spain reeled from a series of fires fueled by a summer heatwave.
Earlier Sunday, Spain deployed a further 500 soldiers to battle wildfires that have torn through parched woodland during a prolonged spell of scorching weather, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said.
The decision to add to the more than 1,400 troops already on wildfire duty came as authorities struggled to contain forest blazes, especially in the northwestern Galicia region and awaited the arrival of promised aircraft reinforcements from other European countries.
Firefighters are tackling 12 major wildfires in Galicia, all of them near the city of Ourense, the head of the Galician regional government, Alfonso Rueda, told a press conference with Sanchez.
"Homes are still under threat, so we have lockdowns in place and are carrying out evacuations," Rueda said. Galicia has been battling the spreading flames for more than a week.
Temperatures in Spain could reach 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas Sunday, the Spanish national weather agency AEMET said. On Saturday, the maximum temperature was 44.7 degrees C in the southern city of Cordoba, it said.
"This Sunday, when extraordinarily high temperatures are expected, the danger of wildfires is extreme in most of the country," AEMET said on the social platform X.
The fires in Spain this year have burned 158,000 hectares (390,000 acres), according to the European Union’s European Forest Fire Information System. That is an area roughly as big as metropolitan London.
Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Scientists say that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness in parts of Europe, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires.
