Five days after a wildfire destroyed a remote expatriate community in southern Spain, judicial authorities announced late Tuesday that all 13 victims of the disaster had been identified through biological samples.
At the same time, French firefighters managed to bring a separate forest fire under control near the historic Fontainebleau area south of Paris, as dangerously high temperatures continued to grip parts of Europe.
According to a statement from judicial authorities, nearly all of the victims in the Spanish wildfire were foreign nationals — all of them adults. Among the dead were seven British citizens, including a 93-year-old woman who passed away at a hospital, three Belgian nationals, a French woman, an American, and one Spanish national. Of the 13 victims, eight were women and five were men.
Investigators had initially believed as many as 23 people were unaccounted for, but all of those individuals have since been located now that the victims have been fully identified.
The fire, known as the Los Gallardos fire, burned through approximately 70 square kilometers — about 27 square miles — of forest and agricultural land, ranking it among the deadliest wildfires Spain has experienced in recent years.
Extreme heat gripping Spain, combined with strong winds and minimal rainfall, has created dangerous conditions that allow small fires to spread rapidly and with little resistance.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, with temperatures rising at twice the global average rate since the 1980s.
In France, temperatures remained unusually high into Wednesday, with local highs reaching 39 degrees Celsius, or about 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The national weather agency Météo-France cautioned that the combination of intense heat and parched ground conditions was keeping wildfire risk dangerously elevated throughout the country.
The fire that swept through the renowned Fontainebleau forest south of Paris, which forced the evacuation of several nearby neighborhoods, has been brought under control. However, local authorities noted that firefighters were still working to extinguish smaller flare-ups across the affected region.
