{"id":308191,"date":"2026-07-28T23:55:44","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T23:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/308191\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T23:55:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T23:55:44","slug":"massive-wildfires-draw-close-to-madrid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/308191\/","title":{"rendered":"Massive Wildfires Draw Close to Madrid"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the worst wildfires in Spanish history tore through the country, Elena S\u00e1nchez paused from selling beers in a kiosk on the edge of an artificial lake in Madrid and pointed west toward the sunset. It was the wrong color.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to be like that,\u201d Ms. S\u00e1nchez, 54, said on Sunday evening, looking at a hazy gray blush \u2014 the fire\u2019s smoky residue \u2014 in the not-so-distant distance.<\/p>\n

As fires raged 30 miles from Madrid in recent days, an acrid burning smell imbued all of this park on Madrid\u2019s western edge, Ms. S\u00e1nchez said. Though the situation improved over the weekend, people initially stopped exercising for the itching in their throats, she said, and older residents wore surgical masks outdoors. She could still feel the smoke on her tongue, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s scary,\u201d Ms. S\u00e1nchez said. \u201cI\u2019m afraid it might reach here.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, wealthy expats, immigrant workers and global attention have made Madrid a booming European capital<\/a>. But as the flames on Monday reached new areas around the capital and extended to more regions around the country, a suffocating reality check has also reached the city.<\/p>\n

In a country led by a government that has defined itself by the seriousness with which it takes climate change, the flames have come unsettlingly close to the capital. The fires around Madrid have brought to tears the region\u2019s president, Isabel D\u00edaz Ayuso. Experts say they are a harbinger for the damage to come on the world\u2019s fastest warming continent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are difficult hours,\u201d Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez said Monday afternoon during a news conference in Castell\u00f3n, on Spain\u2019s eastern coast, where a new fire raged and forced thousands of new evacuations.<\/p>\n

In the face of what his government has called the largest fires in the country\u2019s history, and after a summer of record-breaking heat waves, he called for a national pact with all Spain\u2019s political parties to work together to prevent blazes that he attributed to climate change. \u201cThis climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned all of Spain and Europe about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On Monday, regional authorities ordered the evacuation of Valdemaqueda, a town of about 870 people roughly 25 miles away from the Spanish capital, another sign that the wildfires west of Madrid were not fully under control. Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain\u2019s interior minister, said that firefighters had a \u201ccrucial\u201d two-day window to control the fires around Madrid before extreme temperatures topping 100 Fahrenheit were expected to wallop the country.<\/p>\n

All that has shaken Madrid\u2019s residents, who can\u2019t remember when such a large fire came so close to the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a wake-up call,\u201d said Leopoldo Salvador, 84, who walked under a statue of Don Quixote in the Plaza Espa\u00f1a, a central square in Madrid. He said he closed the windows of his house over the temperate weekend to keep the smoke out.<\/p>\n

Near the city\u2019s royal palace, Cristina Herrero, 46, a biology professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, listened on her phone to news about the fires. She and her friends walked by the palace gardens with sheep dogs that they had evacuated from their farms outside the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Ms. Herrero called out to another dogwalker as her pack barked and growled at the unleashed dogs around them. \u201cThese are evacuated dogs!\u201d<\/p>\n

As the other dogwalker gave her a dirty look, she talked about the sheep and horses and beehives she had left behind in the farms outside the city. Ms. Herrero said that while the city still felt insulated and safe, those living just to the capital\u2019s west were \u201cvery worried.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her friend Henar Hidalgo Riol, 60, who was also walking an evacuated dog, agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are fires everywhere,\u201d Ms. Hidalgo Riol said, adding that dry brush carpeted the mountains surrounding Madrid. \u201cPeople know they\u2019re sitting on a powder keg.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts said the fires resulted partly from the loss of rural culture that had required forest management. Less grazing and less logging meant woods and landscapes throughout Spain, and in greater Madrid, were left untouched, a potentially explosive ingredient when combined with dry conditions that are made more likely<\/a> by the burning of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cFires now find fuel everywhere,\u201d said V\u00edctor Resco, professor of forest engineering in the University of Lleida.<\/p>\n

Outside the royal palace on Monday, Charo Fern\u00e1ndez, 65, a lawyer, strolled toward a horizon that looked like a mountain range but was the faint silhouette of smoke from the fires to the west. She said her clothes reeked of smoke over the weekend, and that smoke had billowed from the west and toward the city as if \u201cout of a chimney.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those signs of fire were like nothing Ms. S\u00e1nchez, who works at the kiosk by the lake, said she had ever seen. She said that Madrid\u2019s weeks of record-breaking heat had already exhausted her, and that climate change seemed unstoppable. No matter what resources and legislation the country threw at the fires.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just keeps spreading,\u201d she said, looking at the sullied sunset. \u201cJust don\u2019t let it reach here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carlos Barrag\u00e1n contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the worst wildfires in Spanish history tore through the country, Elena S\u00e1nchez paused from selling beers in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5886,4173,83827,89044,9,11,10,2208,25998],"class_list":["post-308191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-europe","tag-global-warming","tag-heat-and-heat-waves","tag-madrid-spain","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-spain","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}