Burning Garden and Farm Waste in Portugal in 2026: A Practical Guide to the 4 Square Metre Pile Rule, When the Council Has to Say Yes, the Days All Fire Is Banned, and Fines up to 25,000 Euros

You have cleared the ground around the house, cut back the brambles, taken the low branches off the pines and pruned the olives. Now there is a heap of green waste the size of a small car sitting in the corner of the plot, and the neighbour has told you the way to deal with it is to wait for a still evening and light it. That advice was legal once. Since 1 January 2022 it has not been, at least not without a step that most people skip.

Burning cut vegetation in mainland Portugal is regulated as a use of fire, not as waste disposal. Depending on the calendar, the day's fire danger rating and the shape of the pile, the same bonfire can be a lawful activity you notified the council about, a lawful activity you needed written permission for, or a contraordenação (administrative offence) carrying a fine that starts at 2,500 euros. This guide sets out which is which.

The law that applies, and the one that does not

The rules live in Decreto-Lei n.º 82/2021, de 13 de outubro (Decree-Law 82/2021), which set up the Sistema de Gestão Integrada de Fogos Rurais (Integrated Rural Fire Management System), known as SGIFR. It entered into force on 1 January 2022 and it expressly revoked Decreto-Lei n.º 124/2006, the old Sistema Nacional de Defesa da Floresta Contra Incêndios that a great deal of online advice, and more than a few council web pages, still cite.

Decree-Law 82/2021 has since been amended five times, most recently by Decreto-Lei n.º 86/2026, de 15 de abril, which pushed the effective life of the old municipal forest-fire defence plans out to 31 December 2026 because the replacement municipal execution programmes are not ready in most councils. None of those amendments changed the fire-use rules described below.

The regime covers mainland Portugal. Madeira and the Azores legislate their own rural fire rules regionally, so if you are on the islands, check with your câmara rather than relying on this.

Two different things with two different rules

The law does not have one category called "burning garden waste". It has two, and the difference is whether the material has been gathered into a heap.

Queima de amontoados is defined as using fire to eliminate forest or agricultural residues that have been completely cut and then heaped in a limited space not exceeding 4 square metres and a height of 1.3 metres. That is a small pile: roughly two metres by two metres at the base, no taller than your chest. Prunings from vines, olives and fruit trees are the textbook case.

Queimada is defined as using fire for pasture renewal, for eliminating stubble, and for eliminating forest or agricultural residues that have been cut but not heaped. This is the extensive burn: fire moving across an area of ground rather than consuming a pile.

The distinction matters enormously, because a queimada is subject to a far heavier procedure. If your heap is bigger than 4 square metres and 1.3 metres, or if you plan to run fire across cut material lying where it fell, you are in queimada territory whatever you call it.

The daily rating that overrides everything

Every rule below turns on the rural fire danger level for your concelho on the day. IPMA and ICNF jointly determine and publish it, and it runs on five levels: reduzido (low), moderado (moderate), elevado (high), muito elevado (very high) and máximo (maximum). It is set council by council, so your neighbour across the boundary can be on a different rating.

When a concelho is at muito elevado or máximo, a package of restrictions switches on automatically. Separately, the Centro de Coordenação Operacional Nacional (National Operational Co-ordination Centre) can impose the same restrictions regardless of the day's rating, where conditions could seriously affect the safety of people and property, and that decision takes effect immediately.

When you need permission, and when a notification is enough

For queima de amontoados, the calendar works like this:

• 1 June to 31 October, danger below "muito elevado": you need an autorização (authorisation) from the câmara municipal, which must define the supervision needed given how susceptible the area is to fire at that moment.
• The rest of the year, danger below "muito elevado": a mera comunicação prévia (simple prior notification) to the câmara municipal is enough.
• Any day the concelho is at "muito elevado" or "máximo": authorisation from the local authority is required, with supervision it defines, and this applies even to burns carried out to meet compulsory plant-health requirements.

For queimadas, the rules are stricter at every point:

• At "muito elevado" or "máximo": prohibited outright. There is no permission that makes it lawful.
• Otherwise: authorisation from the município is required, and the council weighs the proposal, the meteorological and operational context, and the proposed date and place.
• Supervision is compulsory. The burn must be accompanied by a technician credentialed in prescribed fire, or, in the absence of one, by a firefighter team, a forest sapper team, agents of the national forest agents corps, the special civil protection force, the forest sapper firefighters force or the special protection and rescue unit.
• The one shortcut: where the queimada is carried out by technicians credentialed in prescribed fire, prior communication replaces the authorisation.

Both the authorisation request and the prior communication are addressed to the município, either by telephone or through the electronic platform ICNF makes available. Where a council takes a request by phone, it is obliged to register it on the platform itself.

How to actually file it

The platform is the ICNF's Queimas e Queimadas system, reached through fogos.icnf.pt. Registration is mandatory, and the process runs in three steps: identify the action, identify the location and date, and receive the answer by SMS or email. The system does not simply record your request. It weighs the danger level, the meteorology and the number of fires in recent days, and returns an assessment of the risk conditions for the day you asked about.

Two practical notes. First, not every council is on the platform. At the time of writing, ICNF lists Aljezur, Castro Marim, Lisboa and São João da Madeira as not registered, and tells applicants in those councils to contact the câmara municipal directly. Second, there is a mobile route for pile burns, an Android application called queima segura, which is not distributed through Google Play and has to be installed from a QR code on the ICNF page, with mobile data active. For questions, ICNF gives the address [email protected].

Leave time. The authorisation is a decision by the council, not an automatic receipt, and in the summer window the council may attach supervision conditions that themselves need arranging.

The rules on the day

If you have your authorisation or have filed your notification, one duty applies over everything else: the person responsible for a pile burn may not leave the site while it is burning, and not until the fire is properly out and its extinction is assured. Walking away from a smouldering heap is not a lapse of etiquette, it is a breach of the decree-law.

On days when your concelho is at muito elevado or máximo, several other things are off:

• No bonfires for recreation, leisure or village festivals, anywhere in rural territory.
• Fire for cooking, and burning or combustion equipment for lighting or cooking, only in places expressly provided for it, such as properly equipped and signposted picnic and leisure parks.
• No launching of lit-wick balloons or rockets of any kind.
• Other pyrotechnics require a licence from the município or the freguesia, except categories F1, P1 and P2. The licence must be obtained at least 15 days in advance and confirmed in the 48 hours before use, without prejudice to any police authorisation the law separately requires.
• No fumigation or disinfestation of beehives using fire.
• No smoking and no making fire of any kind inside rural territories, or on the roads that bound them or cross them. "Rural territories" means forest and agricultural land, which in practice is most of the country outside built-up areas.

What it costs to get wrong

Enforcement is spread across the GNR, the PSP, the Polícia Marítima, ICNF, the câmaras municipais, municipal police forces and nature wardens. For fire-use offences the case file is generally built by the GNR or the PSP, and the final decision on the fine rests with the GNR's commander-general or the PSP's national director. Criminal liability for the same facts is expressly preserved, so a fine is not necessarily the end of it.

The three tiers, for a natural person and then for a company:

• Light (including a queimada carried out by credentialed technicians without the required prior communication): 150 to 1,500 euros, and 500 to 5,000 euros.
• Serious (including a queimada without the municipal authorisation, or in breach of the supervision conditions, and smoking or making fire in rural territory on a very high or maximum danger day): 500 to 5,000 euros, and 2,500 to 25,000 euros.
• Very serious (including any queimada on a very high or maximum danger day, and bonfires, use of fire or pile burning on such a day in breach of the conditions, and launching balloons or rockets): 2,500 to 25,000 euros, and 12,500 to 125,000 euros.

Attempt is punishable in the serious and very serious tiers. Negligence is always punishable, with the minimum and maximum halved. On top of the fine, a serious or very serious offence can carry accessory sanctions lasting up to two years: forfeiture of the objects involved, a ban on exercising the related activity where it depends on a public title or authorisation, loss of the right to public subsidies or benefits, and suspension of authorisations, licences or alvarás.

There is one more consequence that is easy to miss. Carrying out a queimada without authorisation and without the required supervision, or a pile burn without authorisation and without the supervision the local authority defined, is deemed by the decree-law to be intentional use of fire. That characterisation is what turns a tidy-up into something an investigator treats as a possible ignition source when a fire follows.

The alternatives the law points you to

Decree-Law 82/2021 expressly allows councils, parishes and producer organisations to develop alternative methods of eliminating and treating cut material, naming composting, areas for the temporary deposit and storage of biomass, and collection schemes for residents. Many councils in the interior now run one or more of these, sometimes with a free chipper loan or a seasonal green-waste collection round, and several charge nothing for it during the summer.

It is worth calling the câmara before you plan a burn at all, because the alternative is often quicker than the authorisation. Chipping also leaves you with mulch rather than ash, which is the better outcome on the thin soils most of this material comes off. Our guide to recycling and household waste covers the municipal side of the collection system more generally.

What this means for you

• If you own rural land with a house on it: the compulsory fuel management around buildings gives you the cut material, but nothing in that duty tells you to burn it. Cutting is obligatory, burning is one permitted disposal route among several, and it is the only one with a permission attached. See our wildfire season safety guide for the clearance rules themselves.
• If you have just bought a smallholding: register on the ICNF platform before you need it. Doing it for the first time on a Saturday morning with a heap already built is how people end up burning without cover.
• If you keep bees: the ban on fire-based fumigation and disinfestation applies on very high and maximum danger days, which in August is most of them in much of the country. Plan hive work around the rating.
• If you are organising a village event: the bonfire and the rockets are separate permissions with separate timings, and the pyrotechnics licence needs 15 days plus a confirmation in the final 48 hours. That is a planning constraint, not a formality.
• If you are pruning trees anyway: the felling rules are a different regime with different authorisations. Our guide to cutting down a tree on your own land covers what you may lawfully take down before you worry about what to do with it.

ICNF puts the share of rural fire occurrences in mainland Portugal with a human cause at about 98 percent. That figure is the reason the paperwork exists, and it is also the reason the penalties sit where they do. Portugal has burned less in 2026 than in 2025 but has started more fires than in any year since 2022, and the great majority of those ignitions began as somebody's ordinary afternoon job. A phone call to the câmara, or ten minutes on the ICNF platform, is what separates the job from the ignition.