ROME — A fast-spreading forest fire in southern Spain claimed nearly a dozen lives including foreign nationals, local authorities said, elevating the death toll of Europe’s blistering summer.
The fire started near Los Gallardos, a town in Andalusia known for drawing foreign retirees and expats. One of the people who died was probably Spanish, while the others “appeared” to be foreign nationals, including four British citizens, according to Antonio Sanz, the health and emergencies minister in Andalusia.
“The truth is that we are facing a situation that we can only describe as a tragedy,” Sanz told reporters.
Authorities set the provisional death toll at 11 making the forest fire the deadliest on record in Andalusia. The wildfire comes as sustained high temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 38 degrees Celsius) have raised fears of another season of deadly summer fires across a vast swath of Europe. At least 1,000 people were evacuated from the area.
Four of the people killed were discovered trapped inside a car, while others were found in circumstances suggesting they had tried to escape the flames, Sanz said. Populated areas in and around the fire zone were being evacuated. Four people were being treated for severe burns, while hundreds of people had been relocated. The challenging topography of the area — including many ravines — was complicating the emergency effort, officials said.
Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles told radio network Cadena SER that 200 members of an emergency military unit and 70 vehicles had been dispatched to combat the blaze.
Authorities warned the complex fire in Spain was still a threat and could worsen, as higher winds are predicted, while firefighters battled a blaze that had already claimed more than 7,700 acres. The fire appeared to start, officials said, as a result of a downed power line. Emergency workers are seeking to contain and extinguish the flames by land and air.
In a post on X, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expressed “immense sadness and desolation in the face of the terrible consequences of the fire.”
Last year, the European Union witnessed its worst forest fire season since records began in 2006, one that experts fear could be exceeded as the world’s fastest-heating continent confronts blistering temperatures. In June, the average temperatures in Spain reached the highest recorded since records began in the 1950s.