Portugal's Burnt Area Is Down Three Quarters This Year, and a Fire Specialist Credits the Weather Rather Than the Government
The provisional report counts 56,586 hectares burnt to 15 August, a fall of 74.7 percent. Carlos Trindade of the Pyrocene Alliance says a moderate Daily Severity Rating explains it, and warns that a strong El Nino could carry the critical period into November.
Portugal has burnt about 56,586 hectares between 1 January and 15 August this year, according to the provisional rural fires report. That is a fall of 74.7 percent on the same window in 2025, when more than 220,000 hectares had already gone. Counting only from 1 June, there were 4,154 fires across 56,600 hectares, well under the decade average of 90,800.
The government has read those numbers as a return on its own preparation. On Thursday the PSD parliamentary leader, Hugo Soares, praised the "political capacities" of the Interior Minister, Luís Neves, on Rádio Observador. The Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, followed by saying the fire-fighting apparatus assembled this year "is answering the challenge of reducing the impact of rural fires, preventing many from spreading".
The expert's reading is colder
Carlos Trindade, a rural fire specialist at the NGO Pyrocene Alliance, told Observador that the explanation lies mostly in the weather. He describes 2026 as a "relatively calm summer", particularly from the start of August, and puts it bluntly: "This year the politicians are lucky."
His measure is the Daily Severity Rating, an index that quantifies how many meteorological parameters line up in favour of fire. In practice it answers one question: given today's weather and fuel moisture, how hard would a fire started now be to control? Those readings stayed moderate through the summer, and that, Trindade argues, is what kept the season from turning.
He is equally sceptical that fleet size explains anything. "The apparatus may serve very well to fight 99 percent of nascent fires, but the 1 percent you cannot put out in the first hour generates 98 percent of the burnt area," he said. At a high severity rating, even a firefighter for every tree would change nothing. "We could have an apparatus costing a thousand million euros. In a difficult year, it will always fail." What has to be prepared, on his account, is the territory itself.
Why September and October still matter
The season is not over. Trindade points to El Niño, which the United Nations expects to run strong and possibly last into February 2027, as a reason the critical period may stretch to November. "We still have three months ahead of us: September, October and perhaps November," he said, adding that if the phenomenon strengthens as forecast, "the summer is still to come".
He notes that this year's fires in Trás-os-Montes and around Valpaços burned in hot but not extreme conditions. The extreme, he expects, arrives later: towards the end of September or in October. Eleven councils across four districts were placed at maximum fire risk on Friday, and the government spent Thursday appealing to individual responsibility rather than announcing new means.
What this means for expats
- A quiet summer is not a safe autumn: the critical period runs past the school year in a strong El Niño, so the rules on clearing and burning still apply. Our guide to burning garden and farm waste sets out the pile limits and the days when all fire is banned.
- Where the risk actually sits: a study we covered in August found that four fifths of the land burnt since 2020 lies in under a third of the mainland, much of it far from a fire station.
- The 2026 fires that did get away: the blazes at Vouzela and Valpaços were declared a natural catastrophe, with 10 million euros following 32 parishes across nine councils.
- The apparatus itself: this year's DECIR deployment put 13,335 operatives and 78 aircraft in the field from 1 June, the reference point behind the government's claim.
