Wildfire in Spain rages out of control

Hundreds of firefighters tackling the blaze which forced 1,500 to flee

Hundreds of firefighters were battling Spain's first major forest fire of the year, which has so far forced 1,500 people to evacuate their homes. AFP

About 700 firefighters were battling Spain's first major forest fire of the year, which on Saturday was out of control 48 hours after it began, forcing 1,500 people to flee their homes.

In an update on Twitter, the regional emergency services said the fire in Villanueva de Viver, about 90 kilometres north of Valencia, was a “highly-complex blaze taking place in weather conditions similar to those of the summer”.

“Seven hundred people have been mobilised for the operation (to fight the fire). It has affected 3,900 hectares and has a 35-kilometre perimeter,” they said, indicating the number of people forced out of their homes on Friday, about 1,500, had not changed.

They said the wildfire remained “very voracious” and the work to put it out “very complicated”.

Firefighters tweeted that they had sent 20 planes and helicopters to tackle the fire.

“Clearly the fire has not stabilised because it is still burning with great ferocity given that the weather is almost like summer,” Ximo Puig, leader of the Valencia region, told Spain's RTVE public television.

The fire began just after noon (1200 GMT) on Thursday.

With the vegetation dried out by a lack of moisture in the atmosphere in recent months and large amounts of combustible biomass in the forests, conditions were “perfect” for such a blaze, Manolo Nicolas, of the Castellon firefighters, told public radio on Friday.

In 2022, which was a particularly bad year for wildfires in Europe, Spain was the worst-hit country with nearly 500 blazes that destroyed more than 300,000 hectares, according to figures from the European Forest Fire Information System.