In a small green meadow in the Gredos mountains, west of Madrid, a couple of dozen cows belonging to Juan Ángel Izquierdo and his family are grazing. The only noise is the gentle clang of the bells around the animals' necks. This would be an idyllic scene were it not for the blackened pine and oak trees all around, the legacy of a devastating recent wildfire.
"It was immense, I've never seen anything like it," says Izquierdo, whose family have been farming here for 200 years. The fire, in late July, merged with two others, burning a total of around 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres), making it the biggest blaze Spain has ever registered. It consumed more than two-thirds of Izquierdo's land and killed 12 of his 85 cows.
Another eight animals had to be put down because of their injuries. All the hay he had gathered to feed his cows in the winter was also burned. "For us farmers, the summers are becoming more and more worrying, because they are getting hotter," he says.
"It rains less, the wet season ends earlier and the autumn starts much later." For farmers, such conditions are synonymous with fires. "If you don't think about the wildfires too much, you feel okay," Izquierdo says. "But when a fire starts in a nearby village you start wondering – 'and what if we're next?'." Wildfires are one of several symptoms of climate change which in recent years have had a substantial impact on Spain's economy, as well as contributing to shocking human tragedies.
World Weather Attribution, an international research organisation, found that the extreme conditions that drove record-breaking fires in Spain and Portugal in 2025 were 40 times more likely, external to happen due to the warming climate. "The ultimate reason for the greater frequency and intensity of these kinds of fires has to be attributed to the increase in greenhouse gases caused mainly by the generalised use of fossil fuels," said Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, president of the Spanish Meteorology Association. The Socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has described the fires in dramatic terms, placing Spain in the front line of an environmental crisis.
"The climate emergency kills," he said in July, during a visit to the southern province of Almería where a wildfire claimed 15 lives. This year, around 300,000 hectares of land have been burned in Spain, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), approximately half the total affected in the entire European Union. In the last 40 years, damage caused by Spanish fires each year has exceeded 200,000 hectares on eight occasions – three of those since 2022. 'This landscape is completely charred': Inside the village at epicentre of Spain's wildfires 'It's a hell of a situation': Spain grapples with devastating wildfires Farming insurance association Agroseguro estimated that 16,000 hectares of crops had been destroyed by mid-August this year, a major blow for Spain's agri-food industry, which contributes 9% of the country's GDP.
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