A part of Western Europe was suffocated on Saturday by a heat wave that has caused devastating fires and threatens to cause record temperatures this weekend and the beginning of the next.
The fires were especially worrying in Spain, where a major highway linking Madrid with the Portuguese border was cut off from early Saturday morning by a fire burning in Extremadura (southwest).
“We are going to proceed with the opening of a lane” in the 20 km that remain closed of the A5 motorway “to facilitate the transfer of people who have been detained for a long time,” Nieves Villar, general director of Protection, announced to journalists at noon on Saturday. Civil of Extremadura.
After a complicated night, hundreds of firefighters and land and air resources managed to “stabilize” the fire in Extremadura, which threatened the Monfragüe National Park, a natural area protected for its biodiversity, Villar said.
Dozens of fires continued to burn this Saturday in Spain, under a heat wave with extreme temperatures for almost a week, one of the most worrying in the Sierra de Mijas (Andalusia, south), which forced the preventive eviction of more than 3,000 people , according to local authorities.
– Fires in Portugal, France, Greece –
After difficult days, the situation in Portugal improved slightly this Saturday, with only one major active fire in the north of the country, between the districts of Baiao and Amarante.
At noon, the fire was progressing on at least one front, on the slope of a wooded hill in this mountainous region located near the Duero river, AFP journalists confirmed.
The day before, a pilot of a firefighting plane that crashed in the Guarda region (north) died.