A wildfire that started in abnormally high temperatures has burned more than 1,235 acres of land near Benidorm in eastern Spain and forced 180 people to flee their homes, authorities said Monday.
The fire started on Sunday near Tárbena, in the Valencia region, when temperatures reached 30 degrees Celsius, an unusually high figure for the season.
Heat, wind and low humidity fueled the fire, which media reported may have started with an agricultural fire.
“The fire is still active” after a “complicated” night for firefighters, the region’s emergency services wrote on X, the old Twitter.
They said the fire had destroyed “more than 500 hectares (1,235 acres)” of land.
A wildfire that started in abnormally high temperatures has burned more than 1,235 acres of land near Benidorm in eastern Spain (pictured) and forced 180 people to flee their homes, authorities said Monday.
The fire started on Sunday near Tárbena, in the Valencia region, when temperatures reached 30 degrees Celsius, an unusually high temperature for the season.
A helicopter is seen working to put out fires in eastern Spain on Monday
A helicopter fills with water from a pool as crews work to fight the fire.
A Spanish firefighting helicopter is seen during a forest fire that broke out in the town of Tárbena, Alicante, eastern Spain, April 15, 2024.
“About 180 people have been evacuated” from the two most affected areas, Pilar Bernabé, representative of the central government in Valencia, told public television.
Eight air units fought the fire along with firefighters and members of the UME military emergency unit, which intervenes to help in larger fires.
According to the national meteorological service AEMET, temperatures exceeded 30C in more than 65 areas of Spain on Saturday, including places as far north as the Pyrenees, Galicia and the Castilla y León region.
Tárbena is about 12 miles from the coast and about 10 miles north of the seaside resort of Benidorm, popular with British tourists.
In 2022, some 500 forest fires destroyed more than 300,000 hectares of land in Spain, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).