I can't believe it...

[estación seca]

Yes, this is terrible. I remember the fires in southern California during the early 1970s. Mediterranean climates are wonderful much of the time, but there is always the memory of fire.

[rbarata]

Mediterranean climates are intimately connect with fires. There's no single year without a lot of them.
And it's getting worse every year.

I've found the photo I was talking about of the glass bottles melted by the heat near a city called Leiria. I saw these images in tv taken by a tv station team in the aftermath of this fire.

[rbarata]

Originally Posted by Fernando

Lets hope the rains are benign; the ashes must not get washed away into rivers and lakes and rias/sea.

The rains this week have been weak, more drizzle than rain. Heavy rains, as usual in this time of the year, would have the effect you mentioned. Plus, without its vegetation cover, it would cause heavy soil erosion. That didn't happened but what comes next week might be worse: more heat with temps reaching 30ºC.

Originally Posted by Fernando

Why are Spain and Portugal living back-to back ... ?

In the areas around our borders they (the borders) simply don't exist. There's an intensive cultural/social and economical interchange, including emergency services. In our northern border (Galicia), for ex, there's an extra governamental agreement between firefighters corporations. When there's a fight on Galician side, portuguese firefighters go immediately there as if it was in Portugal, and vice-versa.
Unfortunately, this time we could not help each other due to fires on both sides.

[camille1585]

I didn't realize it was that bad in Portugal! If the news talked about wildfires, it was only about the raging infernos in California, with no/little mention of Portugal.

Earlier this week the sky was yellow/red, both from sand from the Sahara and smoke from the fires in Portugal. If smoke was getting carried 2000km north, then you know that the fires were really bad...