Twelve of the 13 victims of a deadly wildfire that swept through Andalusia in southern Spain were foreign nationals, the authorities said on Tuesday after completing post-mortem examinations.<\/p>\n
In a statement, officials said seven were from the United Kingdom, three from Belgium, and one each from France and the United States. The last victim was a Spanish citizen.<\/p>\n
“The 13 people who died are eight women and five men, all adults,” the public body responsible for identifying the victims added.<\/p>\n
Fire broke out last Thursday in the picturesque southeastern province of Almeria, which is home to many foreign residents near the Mediterranean coast.<\/p>\n
Flames fanned by high winds ripped through forests and scrubland made tinderbox dry by extreme high temperatures, turning picturesque rural settlements into ghost towns.<\/p>\n
Emergency services initially recovered 12 bodies that were so badly burned that DNA samples were needed to identify them.<\/p>\n
The fire, one of Spain’s deadliest in recent years and caused by an electrical cable falling on a road, devastated some 7000 hectares (more than 17,000 acres) of land.<\/p>\n
The fire has since been brought under control and residents have been able to return to their homes since Sunday.<\/p>\n
Spain has in recent years experienced increasingly long and frequent heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding 40C, creating perfect conditions for wildfires.<\/p>\n
In 2025, more than 393,000 hectares were destroyed by fire, according to the European Forest Fire Information System – the most in Spain’s recent history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twelve of the 13 victims of a deadly wildfire that swept through Andalusia in southern Spain were foreign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-531722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}