The teams are fighting “swirls of fire” and intense heat in northern Spain

The authorities said on Monday that the intense heat and strong winds caused the “swirls of fire”, as the fire burned many houses and forced to evacuate hundreds of people near a national park listed in UNESCO in northern Spain.

About 800 people were asked to abandon their homes in half of the villages of the villages in the north of Castile and Leon, where several huge fires were.

The residents of the town of Kongusta were spraying homes, trees and sidewalks with their garden hoses to enter the fire that devoured at least two buildings, while the police told them to be evacuated.

The smoke was very thick for the fire -to -wrestling aircraft.

“There are already many homes that have been burned, we don’t know what to do anymore. We are not fully defenders and have been abandoned,” said Evangelina Perral Delgado, a 70 -year -old, said.

Juan Carlos Suarez Kenons, head of the environment of the regional government, said that high temperatures on Sunday caused a fire near the Las Villas Park, forcing firefighters to decline.

“This happens when temperatures reach about 40 ° C in a very confined valley, and then suddenly (fire) enter a more open and oxygen area. This produces a fiery ball, a spiral of fire.”

Scientists say that the hottest summer in the Mediterranean region exposes it to a great danger of forest fires. Once the fires begin, the dry vegetation and strong winds can cause them to spread quickly and burn out of control, which sometimes raises the swirls of fire.

A long heat wave continued in Spain on Monday, with temperatures reaching 42 ° C in some areas.

Domingo Abarisio, 77, was evacuated to a town near his home in Copo de Benavinti on Sunday after a warehouse was burned in front of his house.

“How can I feel?” He said. “It is always shocking for people close to the disaster.”

Suarez Kenons said that there are two or three fires that had started due to lightning strikes, but there were evidence that the majority was the result of intentional burning, which he described as “environmental terrorism.”

In the northern part of the neighboring Portugal, approximately 700 firefighters were fighting a fire that started on Saturday in Tranokoso, about 350 km northeast of Lisbon.

So far this year, about 52,000 hectares, or 0.6 per cent of the total area of Portugal, have burned the average of 2006-2024 for the same period by about 10,000 hectares, according to the fire information system in European forests.

The authorities said that firefighters were fighting the burn in Navara in northeastern Spain and in Huelva in the southwest.