News 25 July 2026

Ávila's wildfires just pulled 128 Portuguese firefighters across the border

Portugal sent a 128-strong joint force to fight the wildfires burning in Ávila, Spain, under the mutual civil-protection aid protocol between the two countries.

The convoy left Guarda at three in the afternoon on Saturday. That is 128 Portuguese emergency workers heading for the Spanish province of Ávila, where rural fires have spent days outrunning local crews, and the army sent 500 combat rations along with them so nobody has to fight a wildfire on an empty stomach.

Who did Portugal send to the Ávila wildfires?

It is called a Joint Operational Force and it pulls people from several places at once: the command structure and Special Civil Protection Force of Portugal’s national emergency authority, firefighters from the Beiras and Serra da Estrela sub-region, and the GNR’s emergency and rescue unit. David Lobato, the sub-regional emergency commander for Médio Tejo, is running it on the ground.

This is not an improvised bit of neighbourliness either. It was triggered under the mutual civil-protection aid protocol Portugal and Spain signed years ago for precisely these weeks, and whose ground rules sit on the Portuguese civil protection portal.

Why did Spain have to ask for outside help?

Because the numbers got away from it. Across the Madrid region and Ávila, more than 60,000 people have already been evacuated or told to stay indoors, and telecoms failures at one point hit around 40 municipalities in the Madrid area. Add what is burning on the other side of the Pyrenees, in France, and the wave of fires crossing the peninsula and southwestern Europe has touched more than 200,000 people.

Spain asked the European Union for reinforcements and several countries answered: alongside Portugal, Croatia, Czechia and Slovakia offered aerial assets. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism exists for exactly this, and it has had a busy summer.

Portugal had already sent France two water-bombers earlier in the week, which tells you what is really going on: the countries that usually lend each other equipment all need it on the same afternoon. At home the fire risk is still high across dozens of municipalities, and the crews that drove out to Ávila today are people Portugal would badly want back if the wind changes its mind.

By Marta Carneiro

Image: Anual / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

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