The fires that broke out over the past week in France and Spain, which have already burned more than 115,000 hectares and forced more than 320,000 people from their homes, have stood out for the sheer ferocity and scale of the flames. The French authorities acknowledge that they may take months to put them out.
They are the latest examples of what the operational and scientific community began calling, from the second half of the 2010s onwards, "sixth-generation fires", especially after the blazes in Pedrógão Grande in Portugal (2017) and in Greece (2018), each of which claimed more than 100 lives.
