How long did the Esmeralda fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 April 2020 to 20 April 2020 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 April 2020 to 17 April 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,203 hectares (22.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Esmeralda (2,211 ha, 1.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 35.2 °C, humidity dropped to 38 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Cuba (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

CU · Cuba · 2020-04-05 → 2020-04-20

Esmeralda fire, 5 April 2020 Esmeralda

Out · last detection 20 Apr 2020, 17:43 UTC

The fire started on 5 April 2020 in Esmeralda, Cuba, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,203 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 10th largest in Camagüey since 2016 (of 63 with a page). Number 7 in Cuba in 2020, of 53.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Esmeralda · 2019 Esmeralda · 2021 Esmeralda · 2019 Esmeralda · 2022

Burnt area: 2,203ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 16days; 5 Apr 2020 – 20 Apr 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 5 Apr; 2020
Heat detections: 168; in a single hotspot: 127 MW
Danger at start: 18; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 183MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Apr20 Apr

Play back 20 Apr 2020

How it evolved, day by day

5 Apr 7 Apr 9 Apr 11 Apr 12 Apr 13 Apr 15 Apr 17 Apr

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

51km/h · peak gust

38%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 8.4 mm on 30 Apr.

This area had burned before

0% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 3 ha in 2019.

3 ha Esmeralda fire, February 2019 1,233 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.4% of the area of London (22 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

Esmeralda where it started

2,211 ha reached on 5 Apr

1.1 %

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)
5 Apr	31.8 °C	39 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
6 Apr	32.9 °C	40 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
7 Apr	31.5 °C	45 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
8 Apr	31.9 °C	47 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
9 Apr	34.3 °C	42 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 19
10 Apr	34.7 °C	46 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
11 Apr	34.6 °C	42 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	High 23
12 Apr	34.6 °C	43 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
13 Apr	34.0 °C	46 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
14 Apr	34.0 °C	44 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
15 Apr	34.2 °C	42 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
16 Apr	35.2 °C	41 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
17 Apr	33.0 °C	45 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
18 Apr	35.2 °C	38 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
19 Apr	34.9 °C	39 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
20 Apr	34.8 °C	41 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
21 Apr after	35.2 °C	43 %	34 km/h	0.1 mm	High 28
22 Apr after	33.1 °C	51 %	34 km/h	0.3 mm	High 25
23 Apr after	32.6 °C	51 %	34 km/h	0.1 mm	High 26
24 Apr after	35.6 °C	37 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
25 Apr after	35.9 °C	39 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 24
26 Apr after	35.6 °C	36 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
27 Apr after	34.1 °C	41 %	40 km/h	0.1 mm	High 34
28 Apr after	31.3 °C	60 %	43 km/h	0.8 mm	Moderate 20
29 Apr after	34.0 °C	44 %	36 km/h	0.1 mm	High 26
30 Apr after	34.3 °C	47 %	33 km/h	8.4 mm	Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Mar 2020

After · 27 Apr 2020

Before After

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 · 168Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Cuba ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Esmeralda fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 5 April 2020 to 20 April 2020 (16 days). The perimeter dates it from 7 April 2020 to 17 April 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,203 hectares (22.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Esmeralda (2,211 ha, 1.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 35.2 °C, humidity dropped to 38 % and gusts hit 51 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 30, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Cuba (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: 105 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Last day with fire: 17 April 2020 → 20 April 2020.
25 October 2026 Start date: 7 April 2020 → 5 April 2020.

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.

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What do you think is wrong?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

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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 105.

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 7 April 2020 to 17 April 2020. 168 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.

Where it burned