Definition
A wildfire is an uncontrolled fire that spreads across vegetation — woodland, scrubland, pasture or forest — outside any intended use of fire. In Spain, size sets the terminology: below 1 hectare it's usually called a conato (an incipient fire put out before it takes hold); above that it's considered a wildfire proper, and some burn through thousands of hectares in a few days when drought, wind and accumulated dry fuel coincide.
Why wildfires happen
For a fire to burn, it needs three things at once: fuel (dry vegetation), favorable conditions (heat, drought, wind) and an ignition source. Lightning is the natural cause, and matters most in dry years with dry thunderstorms.
>90%
of wildfires in Spain are caused by human activity: negligence (uncontrolled agricultural or debris burning, cigarette butts, machinery), accidents, or, less often, arson.
Rural land abandonment makes things worse: less grazing and less forestry use mean more scrub and unthinned woodland, i.e. more accumulated fuel waiting for a spark.
Two scales that aren't the same thing
Spain's Civil Protection framework (Royal Decree 893/2013) defines two distinct scales that the press often blurs together under the word "level." A wildfire can have high potential severity with a low emergency deployment, and that's not a contradiction: they measure different things.
IGP · Potential Severity Index
Scale 0, 1, 2. Measures what the fire could become based on its predictable behavior (terrain, wind, vegetation) — a severity forecast, not what's already been mobilized.
Operational status
Scale 0, 1, 2, 3. Measures the emergency response already declared: operational status 3 corresponds to a declaration of national interest.
Glossary: the terms this observatory uses
Fire status (active, stabilized, controlled, extinguished…)
Active: still evolving, no consolidated perimeter. Stabilized: not expected to spread beyond the control line, with crews still working. Controlled: perimeter consolidated, no risk of escape. Extinguished: officially declared out, no embers left. Reignited: starts evolving again after having been stabilized or controlled.
This observatory only marks a fire as extinguished when an official source says so: the declaration has legal effects (article 50 of Spain's Forestry Law, which bans changing the land use of burned terrain), so it isn't assumed ahead of time.
Conato
A fire under 1 hectare that is no longer active (controlled, extinguished, or no longer being tracked). This observatory excludes these from maps and statistics and shows only their count, so a trickle of small fires put out the same day doesn't distort the real scale of the fire season.
EFFIS / Copernicus perimeter
EFFIS (European Forest Fire Information System, part of the EU's Copernicus programme) detects the actual burned area from satellite imagery and draws its real outline, not an approximate circle. It's an independent confirmation of the official figure, useful especially when the official source is slow to publish or doesn't exist: the EFFIS area never replaces the official burned area, it's shown separately.
Heat spot (FIRMS)
FIRMS (NASA) detects thermal anomalies by satellite every few hours. A single hotspot isn't always a wildfire (it could be an agricultural burn or another heat source), but a cluster of several hotspots coherent in time and place is a strong signal of real thermal activity, and helps estimate how a fire is evolving while there's no more recent official update.
Daily risk level
The FWI (Fire Weather Index) from the European Copernicus/ECMWF model, the same source used by Spain's AEMET, combines temperature, humidity, wind and accumulated drought into 6 levels. It doesn't predict whether a fire will start, but how much the weather and vegetation would favor its spread if one did.
"Per the press" / unconfirmed report
When a fire only appears in media reports and not (yet) in an official bulletin, it's marked as unconfirmed and labeled "per the press, pending official confirmation." Press coverage can only downgrade the status shown (for example, from active to controlled), never escalate it: an alarming headline alone isn't enough to declare a fire has reignited.
What can you do about wildfires?
Before, during and after a wildfire: prevention, how to act if one catches you off guard, and how to file claims and restore land afterwards.
Why this website is not an official source
Observatorio Forestal aggregates and labels public information (official bulletins, satellite data, press coverage), but it is not an emergency service and does not replace official channels. In case of a wildfire or emergency in Spain, always call 112 and follow Civil Protection's instructions.
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