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Chefchaouen fire, September 2020 إقليم شفشاون · Chefchaouen, Larache

Out · last detection 5 Sept 2020, 12:55 UTC

The fire started on 4 September 2020 in Chefchaouen, Morocco, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 864 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 10th largest in Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima since 2016 (of 53 with a page). Number 3 in Morocco in 2020, of 11.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Chefchaouen · 2017Larache · 2020Larache · 2022Chefchaouen · 2021

Burnt area
864ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
3days
4 Sept 2020 – 6 Sept 2020
Municipalities hit
2
provinces
Started on
4 Sept
2020
Heat detections
54
in a single hotspot: 56 MW
Danger at start
36
High · FWI index
Average daily power
308MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 4 Sept6 Sept
5 Sept 2020

How it evolved, day by day

4 Sept 2020 · 478 MW · 38 5 Sept 2020 · 138 MW · 16
4 Sept 5 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

35°high
36km/h · peak gust
23%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

3% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 25 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.5% of the area of London (8.6 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. Chefchaouen إقليم شفشاون 412,713 inhabitants · 24.0 km from the centre where it started
    818 ha reached on 4 Sept
    0.2 %
  2. Larache إقليم العرائش 510,211 inhabitants · 61.4 km from the centre
    48 ha reached on 5 Sept
    0.0 %

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

  • Broadleaved forest64 %
  • Scrub and transitional woodland19 %
  • Coniferous forest10 %
  • Agricultural areas6.0 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

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)
4 Sept 33.0 °C 26 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
5 Sept 34.8 °C 23 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 38
6 Sept 33.4 °C 26 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
7 Sept after 32.9 °C 22 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
8 Sept after 31.5 °C 26 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
9 Sept after 30.3 °C 30 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
10 Sept after 31.2 °C 23 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
11 Sept after 32.0 °C 22 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
12 Sept after 32.5 °C 23 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
13 Sept after 31.6 °C 31 % 21 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
14 Sept after 28.8 °C 48 % 42 km/h 0.4 mm High 26
15 Sept after 29.1 °C 38 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
16 Sept after 29.6 °C 30 % 55 km/h 0.4 mm High 31

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 28 Aug 2020
After · 13 Sept 2020

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 5 September 2020 the air beside the fire reached 60 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 21: 1.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak60 µg/m³
Days over the guideline1 day
PM1078 µg/m³
23456789
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 · 54Every 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 Morocco ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Chefchaouen fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 4 September 2020 and 6 September 2020: 3 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 864 hectares (8.6 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Chefchaouen (818 ha, 0.2 %); Larache (48 ha, 0.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Chefchaouen and came within 24.0 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.8 °C, humidity dropped to 23 % and gusts hit 36 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 38, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Morocco (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: 15 · 150 · 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
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 15 · 150.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 54 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 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 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 slightly from each country’s official figure.