Wildfires near Madrid force evacuations as Spain declares emergency

Spain declared a national emergency on July 24 after wildfires west of Madrid and in Ávila forced more than 10,000 people from their homes. The Interior Ministry took command of the response as smoke from a blaze in Méntrida reached Madrid under a level 2 alert, pushing the crisis to the edge of the capital itself.

The situation widened quickly. Two wildfires merged in central Spain, and another tally put the number of people evacuated or confined at 63,000. Evacuees were sheltering in Madrid on July 25, while a separate fire in eastern Spain killed one person. A man also died in a wildfire near Valencia on July 24, underlining how far the emergency had spread beyond the capital region.

High winds threatened to make firefighting harder on July 25, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the priority was to “save lives.” That imperative reflected how quickly the blazes moved through dry, exposed land west of Madrid, where fast-changing conditions can overwhelm ground crews and aircraft alike.

The government had already been bracing for a severe summer. On May 21, La Moncloa said Sánchez announced Spain had “the largest state deployment for a wildfire campaign” that year, and Home Affairs moved the start of the state’s summer anti-forest-fire campaign up to June 1. Those steps now read as an early warning for a season that has already driven fire fronts to the outskirts of one of Europe’s biggest capitals.

The broader trend is stark. Europe saw its worst year for wildfires since burnt-area tracking began in 2006 in 2025, and Spain’s fire season was already running ahead of the previous year’s record. A 2025 attribution study summarized by Science Media Centre found that the hot, dry and windy conditions that spread Iberian fires were made 40 times more frequent and 30% more intense by climate change than in the pre-industrial climate. For Madrid, the firefront is no longer a distant rural threat but a direct test of how well a growing capital can absorb a crisis once associated with the countryside.