Skip to content
worldfires
en
VE · Venezuela · →

Barinas fire, 17 March 2019 Barinas, Pedraza

Out · last detection 29 Mar 2019, 06:09 UTC

The fire started on 17 March 2019 in Barinas, Venezuela, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 4,282 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 10th largest in Barinas since 2016 (of 117 with a page). Number 40 in Venezuela in 2019, of 298.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Muñoz · 2021Pedraza · 2020Muñoz · 2020Pedraza · 2019

Burnt area
4,282ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
13days
17 Mar 2019 – 29 Mar 2019
Municipalities hit
2
municipalities
Started on
17 Mar
2019
Heat detections
138
in a single hotspot: 163 MW
Danger at start
34
High · FWI index
Average daily power
245MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 17 Mar29 Mar
29 Mar 2019

How it evolved, day by day

17 Mar 2019 · 3 MW · 1 18 Mar 2019 · 14 MW · 4 20 Mar 2019 · 103 MW · 7 21 Mar 2019 · 38 MW · 3 22 Mar 2019 · 93 MW · 1 23 Mar 2019 · 4 MW · 1 24 Mar 2019 · 7 MW · 4 25 Mar 2019 · 520 MW · 20 26 Mar 2019 · 1,219 MW · 56 27 Mar 2019 · 668 MW · 27 28 Mar 2019 · 268 MW · 11 29 Mar 2019 · 4 MW · 3
17 Mar 20 Mar 22 Mar 24 Mar 26 Mar 28 Mar

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

The weather it burned in

38°high
49km/h · peak gust
26%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.3 mm on 30 Mar.

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 2.7% of the area of London (43 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. Barinas 353,851 inhabitants where it started
    4,107 ha reached on 17 Mar
    1.2 %
  2. Pedraza 6,568 inhabitants
    200 ha reached on 18 Mar
    0.0 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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

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)
17 Mar 37.0 °C 31 % 49 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
18 Mar 36.1 °C 33 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
19 Mar 36.5 °C 32 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Mar 38.5 °C 29 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
21 Mar 36.9 °C 30 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
22 Mar 36.7 °C 31 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
23 Mar 37.9 °C 27 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
24 Mar 37.1 °C 29 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
25 Mar 36.9 °C 26 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
26 Mar 37.3 °C 27 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
27 Mar 37.3 °C 30 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
28 Mar 36.5 °C 29 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
29 Mar 33.6 °C 44 % 27 km/h 1.1 mm Moderate 20
30 Mar after 30.5 °C 62 % 23 km/h 8.3 mm Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 10 Mar 2019
After · 5 Apr 2019

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

Detections table · 138Every 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 Venezuela ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Barinas fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 17 March 2019 to 29 March 2019 (13 days). The perimeter dates it from 23 March 2019 to 29 March 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 4,282 hectares (42.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Barinas (4,107 ha, 1.2 %); Pedraza (200 ha, 0.0 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.5 °C, humidity dropped to 26 % and gusts hit 49 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Venezuela (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: 911 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Start date: 23 March 2019 → 17 March 2019.

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
What do you think is wrong?

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 911.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 23 March 2019 to 29 March 2019. 138 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • 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 comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. 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 ADM2 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.