At least 11 people died and another 19 were missing on Friday after a wildfire tore through southern Spain, as Europe braces for a high-risk fire season fueled by scorching temperatures.
The blaze — one of the deadliest on record in Spain — broke out near the municipality of Los Gallardos, in Almería, on Thursday afternoon and prompted evacuations in several neighborhoods, the emergency service of the Andalusia region said.
“This is the first time we’ve faced a fire as devastating as this one,” Francisco Miguel Reyes, the mayor of Los Gallardos, told a Spanish radio station on Friday, adding that “it looks like a bomb went off” over the town.
Four victims were found inside a right-hand drive vehicle and were believed to be British, Antonio Sanz, the health and emergencies minister in Andalusia, said on Friday morning. The other seven victims had left their cars, apparently after trying to flee the flames along a route different from the evacuation path, he said.
“It has been a really tragic day with terrible consequences,” Mr. Sanz said.
The emergency service said initial calls suggested that a downed power line had sparked a blaze that spread rapidly to a wooded area.
Spain’s emergency services had reported 12 deaths, but the Andalusian government later revised the toll down to 11. Eight people were injured, four of them seriously, Mr. Sanz said on Friday morning.
“There are at least 19 people missing,” the president of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno, told a Spanish radio station on Friday morning.
The authorities said that 150 firefighters were tackling the blaze. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said on social media that the military’s emergency unit had also mobilized to help.
Much of Europe has faced a series of searing heat waves this summer, and forecasters have warned that the relentless hot weather is creating an unprecedented danger of wildfires in some countries.
“We are experiencing an exceptionally intense start to the 2026 wildfire season,” Julien Marion, the head of France’s civil protection and crisis management agency, said at a news conference in Paris on Friday.
Rainfall last winter and spring led to lush vegetation that has dried under successive heat waves and created an abundance of fuel for wildfires, Mr. Marion said. Over 8,000 fires have burned nearly 100 square miles so far this year in France, he added — roughly double the area at the same time last year.
A wildfire in the Pyrenees mountain range area of France, on the border with Spain, forced more than 10,000 people to evacuate from their homes, the authorities said on Monday.
Across southern Spain, evacuations have been ordered in several areas because of wildfires. Around 1,000 people had to leave their homes in the town of Benhavís in the Málaga region after a wildfire erupted on Thursday, the regional emergency service said.
Extensive analysis is needed to connect a single heat wave to climate change, but scientists have no doubt that these waves are becoming hotter, more frequent and longer lasting around the world. Europe is getting warmer faster than any other continent.
In Germany, a record-breaking heat wave at the end of June led to roughly 5,100 deaths, according to estimates published on Thursday by the Robert Koch Institute, the federal public health institute.
The institute noted that prolonged periods of extreme heat are rare in Germany. The temperature spike peaked on June 28, when temperatures in Coschen, a town about 50 miles east of Berlin, shattered previous records by reaching 41.7 degrees Celsius, or about 107 degrees Fahrenheit.
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.
