A forest fire in central Portugal has ravaged some 7,000 hectares and caused 11 minor injuries, still mobilizing more than a thousand firefighters on Sunday, said civil protection while the Iberian country is experiencing strong heat.

“The estimated area burned is 7,000 hectares, but the potential for this fire is estimated at more than 20,000 hectares,” said the commander of the emergency services in charge of operations, José Guilherme.

“The more than a thousand operational personnel who will remain on the ground are at this stage trying to guarantee the stabilization of the fire, the perimeter of which has already reached 60 km”, he specified during a press briefing in Proença-a-Nova.

“It’s a very large area with a lot of isolated houses and villages,” he added, adding that the firefighters were focusing their efforts on four hot spots from which the flames were likely to start again.

The fire, which broke out on Friday in the town of Castelo Branco, destroyed some 6,000 hectares in the first 24 hours, according to civil protection.

The smoke and ashes that emanated from it on Saturday reached the shrine city of Fatima (center) even though Pope Francis had gathered more than 200,000 pilgrims there.

Another outbreak mobilized nearly 400 firefighters on Sunday in Odemira, near the southwestern coast of the country, forcing the temporary evacuation of four villages.

“The flames are giving way to the means of combat”, however, indicated Sunday morning a civil protection official, Tiago Bugio, specifying that two fronts of the fire remained active, but that a third, which was heading south and the tourist region of the Algarve, had been brought under control.

With temperatures that sometimes exceeded 40°C on Sunday, civil protection warned on Saturday that the risk of fire would be “very high or maximum throughout the territory” over the “next days”.

In neighboring Spain, a forest fire that burned nearly 600 hectares in Catalonia (north-east), on the border with France, remained under control on Sunday, despite a few recoveries thanks to strong winds, while the Andalusian firefighters managed to control the flames in Bonares, Andalusia (south).

06/08/2023 18:38:15 – Lisbon (AFP) – © 2023 AFP