No respite for the emergency services in Spain. This Sunday, the Iberian firefighters continued to fight several fires, while the extreme and unusually early heat wave begins to subside.
The largest of these forest fires has already destroyed more than 25,000 hectares in the Sierra de la Culebra, a mountain range in the Castile and Leon region, near the border with Portugal, according to regional authorities.
Temperatures still high in Navarre
The fire, which broke out on Wednesday during stormy and dry weather, had forced the authorities to evacuate 14 villages, with several hundred inhabitants. They were allowed to return home on Sunday morning as the situation improved, local officials said. Several roads have been reopened and a high-speed rail link between Madrid and the northwestern region of Galicia, which was closed on Saturday due to the fires, has also been reopened, they added.
Elsewhere in the country, smaller forest fires were also raging in the region of Catalonia (north-west) and in the region of Navarre (north), one of the few regions in Spain where temperatures remained exceptionally high on Sunday. The regional government of Navarre has urged the population to avoid “unnecessary travel” in order to leave the roads free for fire teams.
“Very difficult hours ahead of us”
“We have a few very difficult hours ahead of us,” Navarre Interior Ministry director Amparo Lopez Antelo told reporters. The work of the rescue services was made difficult by high temperatures and gusts of wind blowing from the south, at a speed of more than 30 kilometers (18 miles) per hour, she added.
Temperatures above 40°C were recorded in Spain throughout the week, but they fell on Sunday in most of the country. The mercury is expected to reach only 29°C in Madrid on Sunday and 25°C in the province of Zamora, where the Sierra de Culebra mountain range is located.