Spain battles climate change on several fronts

Spain battles climate change on a landscape that has turned hostile in ways both sudden and slow. In the Gredos mountains west of Madrid, a meadow that should feel timeless now sits ringed by blackened pine and oak. Juan Ángel Izquierdo's family has farmed this ground for 200 years. This summer, fire took most of it.

The blaze that tore through in late July merged with two others, burning roughly 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres). That makes it the biggest fire Spain has ever recorded. It consumed more than two-thirds of Izquierdo's land and killed 12 of his 85 cows. Another eight had to be put down from their injuries. His winter hay, every bale, burned too.

"It was immense, I've never seen anything like it," he says.

His herd now grazes among the dead trees. The bells around their necks are the only sound. It would be idyllic if not for the evidence of what the heat has already done.

A Summer That Keeps Getting Hotter

Izquierdo doesn't talk about climate change in the abstract. He talks about the wet season ending earlier, autumn arriving much later, and summers that worry farmers more each year, a slow shift he's watched build across seasons until it's impossible to ignore. And he talks about those summers. They're getting worse.

If you don't think about the wildfires too much, you feel okay, he says. But a fire starts. It's in a nearby village. And then you start wondering, and you can't stop wondering, because what if we're next, what if it's our turn, what if the flames that took that village are already moving toward us?

That fear is grounded in hard numbers. World Weather Attribution, an international research group, found that the extreme conditions that could drive record-breaking fires in Spain and Portugal in 2025 were 40 times more likely to happen due to a warming climate. Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, president of the Spanish Meteorology Association, put the cause plainly: the rise in greenhouse gases, driven mainly by the widespread use of fossil fuels.

Pedro Sánchez says it's an emergency. Not a seasonal nuisance. He's framing it that way because the stakes are life and death, and he made that plain in July while visiting Almería, where a wildfire claimed 15 lives and where the ground itself still carried the weight of that loss. "The climate emergency kills," he said. And he's right.

This year, roughly 300,000 hectares have burned across Spain, according to the European Forest Fire Information System. That's about half the total burned in the entire European Union. And it's a lot. Over the past four decades, annual fire damage in Spain has topped 200,000 hectares on eight occasions, which is a striking pattern when you consider how these numbers keep piling up year after year. Three of those have come since 2022.

16,000 hectares. Gone by mid-August. That's the estimate from Agroseguro, the farming insurance association, and it's a heavy blow for an agri-food sector that contributes 9% of the country's GDP, a sector that now faces losses stretching across fields and farms and families who've worked that land for generations. Authorities in Castilla y León, the region hit hardest by the fire near Madrid, are offering farmers compensation between €5,500 and €25,000 depending on damage. But Izquierdo expects that to cover less than half of what he lost. It won't come close.

When the Sun Stops Selling

For decades, Spain's warmth was an economic asset. Sun-drenched resorts along the Mediterranean and in the Balearic and Canary Islands built the country into a tourist powerhouse. Nearly 100 million foreigners are expected this year, making Spain the second most-visited country in the world behind France.

Heat is starting to push people away, not just draw them in.

Researchers at Madrid's Rey Juan Carlos University found that high temperatures can deter potential visitors. "When there is a heatwave, the number of overnight stays drops in the destinations that we've studied, and there is also a drop in arrivals from some of Spain's biggest markets," says María Dolores Sánchez, an economist who co-authored the work.

Inland, the medieval city of Toledo offers history and winding streets as an alternative to the coast. This summer tested that offer. Spain logged a record-breaking 61 days of heatwaves stretching into early September. Toledo repeatedly broke 40C.

It's quite difficult to do the tours in the summer. That's what Diego Esteban says. He's a guide with Visit Toledo. And he says we need to adapt, whether it is those of us who work in the tourism industry or the locals, because the summer months make the usual way of doing things much harder for everyone involved. We can't ignore it.

Esteban now builds in frequent stops, provides drinking water, and routes groups through shade. He wants more shade and public fountains. The heat is also shifting the season itself, pushing more visitors into the cooler months of spring and autumn. Spanish travelers, meanwhile, have embraced the "coolcation," heading north to escape the worst of it.

Drought, Then Flood

Drought has been another front. In 2024, after three years of minimal rainfall, Catalonia temporarily imposed some of the strictest water restrictions in the country: a 25% cut for industry and an 80% cut for crop farming. Heavy rain since then has lifted the restrictions, but the drought left its mark on the regional economy.

But the most tragic event was water arriving all at once. In October 2024, flash floods killed 237 people in eastern Spain, centered on the Valencia region, and Climatoc-Lab, a Spanish meteorological research group, called it a manifestation of how global warming alters the hydrological cycle. That's what they said. It's a manifestation, they're saying, of how global warming alters the hydrological cycle, which is a cycle we've long taken for granted and can't easily repair.

"The ultimate reason for the greater frequency and intensity of these kinds of fires has to be attributed to the increase in greenhouse gases caused mainly by the generalised use of fossil fuels." - Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, Spanish Meteorology Association

The Valencia Chamber of Commerce estimated €4.5bn in direct damage. Thousands of businesses were hit. Some were literally washed away. And it's not just numbers. Others, after long recoveries that stretched through months of uncertainty and struggle, limped back to whatever remained of the lives they'd built.

"It was a disaster, both in terms of the lives lost and the impact on businesses, on workers, employers and ordinary people," says Laura Llácer Álvarez, manager of Fepeval, a federation of industrial parks in the region.

Spain's geography, climate, and topography make it unusually exposed as global temperatures rise. It's a fact. Germanwatch, an independent environmental organization, ranked Spain the world's 20th most affected country in its 2024 climate risk index, just behind Nigeria and Mali. But they're not the worst. And we've got the numbers.

An Uncomfortable Kind of Opportunity

Not everyone reads the trend as pure loss. Julián Cubero, head of economics of climate change at BBVA Research, points out that heat drags on output. "We all work worse when it's hot," he says.

But he sees a greener economy creating jobs with higher productivity. The choice, in his view, is between acting and stagnating. "The key is to realise that if we don't act, growth will slow down, and if it's handled right it can become an opportunity," he says.

For Izquierdo, that opportunity is harder to see from a meadow ringed by charred trees. He still has most of his cows. He still has the land, what is left of it. What he does not have is any confidence that next summer will be gentler than this one.