Why Wildfires Happen in Portugal — And Which Regions Are Most Affected

How Bad Was 2025, Really?

It was a serious year. According to the National Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF), roughly 270,000 hectares burned in 8,252 rural fires by the end of November 2025 — the fourth-worst year for burnt area since records began in 2001, and Portugal’s most severe fire season since 2017. Four people died, including a firefighter, and more than a dozen primary residences were destroyed.

For context, the World Weather Attribution initiative found the area burned in Portugal in 2025 was 2.3 times larger than the annual average since 1980, occurring during the most intense heatwave since records began. Portugal has, in fact, been the European country most affected by wildfires over the past decade, with an average of over 93,000 hectares burned annually between 2009 and 2023.

What Actually Causes Portugal’s Wildfires

There isn’t one single cause — it’s a combination of human ignition sources and structural conditions that make fires, once started, far more likely to spread out of control.

Human ignition is the dominant trigger. Official investigations into the 2025 fire season attributed roughly a third of ignitions to arson (incendiarismo), with the remainder split between agricultural burning gone wrong (queimadas for pasture renewal), agroforestry machinery, transport and power-line related incidents, and a smaller share from natural causes like lightning. In other words, the majority of individual fires are started by people — sometimes deliberately, more often through negligence or poorly timed land-clearing.

But the deeper story is about what happens after ignition — and that’s structural. Three long-term factors explain why Portugal’s fires, once started, tend to grow so large:

• Rural depopulation. Decades of migration from inland villages to the coast and to cities has left much of the interior countryside empty. The shepherds and small farmers who once kept vegetation naturally under control through grazing and land management are largely gone, and unmanaged shrubland has taken over.
• Eucalyptus and pine monocultures. Portugal has the largest area planted with eucalyptus in Europe — a fast-growing, highly flammable species originally introduced for the paper pulp industry. Combined with pine, these fire-prone monocultures cover large swathes of the interior. An estimated 80% of Portuguese forest is privately owned and largely unmanaged, much of it in small, fragmented parcels that make coordinated fire prevention genuinely difficult.
• Increasingly extreme summer weather. Longer, hotter, drier summers — consistent with the broader pattern of climate change across Southern Europe — mean more days each year where conditions for extreme fire behavior are met.

The tragic 2017 Pedrógão Grande fire, which killed 66 people, is often cited as the turning point that forced Portugal to rethink its approach — shifting national policy from pure fire suppression toward long-term prevention through the National Plan for Integrated Rural Fire Management (2020–2030).

Which Regions Are Most Affected

This is the part that matters most for anyone choosing where to live in Portugal: wildfire risk is not evenly distributed. It is heavily concentrated in the mountainous interior of the North and Center.

According to official 2025 data, three districts alone accounted for roughly 62% of the total area burned nationally:

Within these districts, the damage is often extremely localized: in 2025, just four municipalities — Trancoso (Guarda), Ponte da Barca (Viana do Castelo), Vila Real, and Arouca (Aveiro) — accounted for over half of the entire country’s burnt area. Trancoso alone lost around 43% of its municipal territory to fire in a single season.

Interestingly, the districts with the highest number of individual fire ignitions — Porto, Braga and Viana do Castelo — are not the same as the districts with the largest burnt area. Most fires there are small (over 90% burn less than one hectare) because they occur in more populated, better-managed areas where response times are short. The real destruction happens when a fire ignites in the sparsely populated, densely forested interior and is able to spread for days before containment.

What this means in practice: the regions where most international buyers look — the Algarve, Greater Lisbon, central Porto, the Silver Coast, and Madeira — are, geographically and structurally, outside the highest-risk zone. These areas have different land use (more urban development, agriculture, or managed landscape), higher population density, and faster emergency response. That doesn’t mean zero risk anywhere in Portugal — parts of the Algarve’s inland hills and the Serra de Monchique have experienced serious fires in the past, most notably in 2018 — but it does mean the risk is not remotely uniform across the country, and it should be assessed regionally and even at the municipal level, not nationally.

What Portugal Is Doing About It

This isn’t a problem being ignored. The Agência para a Gestão Integrada de Fogos Rurais (AGIF) coordinates a national strategy focused on prevention rather than only suppression, including mandatory vegetation-clearing periods around homes and roads each spring, legal limits on new eucalyptus planting, and growing investment in landscape-scale fuel management. Municipalities in the worst-affected areas, including several around Pedrógão Grande, have also strengthened wildland-urban interface protections since 2017, requiring cleared buffer zones around residential properties — a measure that has demonstrably improved safety in the areas where it’s been properly enforced.

What This Means If You’re Buying Property in Portugal

For anyone researching a home in Portugal, the practical takeaway isn’t to be alarmed about the country as a whole — it’s to be regionally informed. A few points worth knowing:

• Location-specific due diligence matters. If you’re considering a rural or inland property, especially in the Center or North, it’s worth asking about the property’s defensible space (cleared buffer zone), proximity to managed vs. unmanaged forest, and local fire history.
• Legal clearing obligations exist and are worth understanding. Portuguese law requires property owners to maintain cleared vegetation zones (faixas de gestão de combustível) around buildings in fire-risk areas — this is a legal obligation, not optional, and is worth factoring into ongoing property maintenance if you’re buying in an affected region.
• Home insurance in Portugal typically covers fire damage as standard, though it’s worth confirming coverage specifics for rural or forest-adjacent properties specifically.
• The areas with the highest buyer interest are generally the lowest-risk areas. This isn’t a coincidence — coastal, urban and well-managed agricultural landscapes are inherently less fire-prone than depopulated mountain interior, and buyer demand has historically concentrated exactly there.