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Balmaseda fire, October 2022 Balmaseda, Valle de Mena, Zalla

Out · last detection 23 Oct 2022, 13:11 UTC

The fire started on 23 October 2022 in Balmaseda, Spain, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 665 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 3 municipalities. According to EGIF (MITECO), it was detected on 23 October 2022 at 11:40 and declared extinguished on 28 October 2022.

Number 52 in Spain in 2022, of 196.

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Burnt area
665ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
4days
23 Oct 2022 – 26 Oct 2022
Municipalities hit
3
municipalities
Started on
23 Oct
2022
Heat detections
38
in a single hotspot: 196 MW
Danger at start
17
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
2.3GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 23 Oct26 Oct

How it evolved, day by day

23 Oct 2022 · 2,302 MW · 38

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

24°high
84km/h · peak gust
42%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 6.9 mm on 30 Oct.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.4% of the area of London (6.6 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Balmaseda 7,718 inhabitants · fire reached the centre where it started
    352 ha reached on 23 Oct
    16 %
  2. Valle de Mena 4,155 inhabitants · 10.0 km from the centre
    194 ha reached on 23 Oct
    0.7 %
  3. Zalla 8,334 inhabitants · 3.5 km from the centre
    119 ha reached on 23 Oct
    3.8 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

What burned

  • Coniferous forest73 %
  • Broadleaved forest8.6 %
  • Other natural land7.1 %
  • Mixed forest5.1 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland5.0 %
  • Artificial surfaces1.2 %
  • Agricultural areas0.6 %

Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area0.47 ha
Residents≈ 60

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.47 hectares of built-up land and about 60 residents (GHSL 2020, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

Official record

According to EGIF (MITECO), this fire started on 23 October 2022 and burned 740 ha (the satellite measured 665 ha).

MITECO, Estadística General de Incendios Forestales (EGIF). This is the agency’s consolidated statistic: it measures the area in its own way, which is why it can differ from the satellite.

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
23 Oct 22.1 °C 42 % 84 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
24 Oct 21.1 °C 49 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
25 Oct 23.6 °C 44 % 54 km/h 0.8 mm Moderate 12
26 Oct 24.3 °C 44 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 13
27 Oct after 24.8 °C 38 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
28 Oct after 22.7 °C 37 % 44 km/h 0.3 mm Moderate 16
29 Oct after 24.9 °C 36 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
30 Oct after 17.0 °C 63 % 37 km/h 6.9 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 16 Oct 2022
After · 2 Nov 2022

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 28 October 2022 the air beside the fire reached 19 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak19 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1052 µg/m³
Optical depth0.34
212223242526272829
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 38Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Spain ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Balmaseda fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 23 October 2022 and 26 October 2022: 4 days between the first and last image with fire. According to EGIF (MITECO), it was detected on 23 October 2022 at 11:40 and declared extinguished on 28 October 2022.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 665 hectares (6.6 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 3 municipalities: Balmaseda (352 ha, 16 %); Valle de Mena (194 ha, 0.7 %); Zalla (119 ha, 3.8 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Balmaseda and reached its centre: the point marking it was inside the burnt area or less than 500 metres from it. That does not mean houses burned.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 24.3 °C, humidity dropped to 42 % and gusts hit 84 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 17, class Moderate.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Spain (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 112.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 38 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • Compared with EGIF (MITECO): 740 official ha against 665 ha of perimeter; they agree within 25%.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2020, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.