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Gouveia fire, July 2017 Vila Cortês da Serra, Juncais, Vila Ruiva e Vila Soeiro do Chão, Carrapichana

Out · last detection 18 Jul 2017, 14:06 UTC

The fire started on 18 July 2017 in Vila Cortês da Serra, Portugal, and satellites saw it burning for 1 day. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 1,426 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 7 municipalities. According to ICNF, it was detected on 18 July 2017 at 14:37 and declared extinguished on 19 July 2017.

Number 43 in Portugal in 2017, of 210.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Gouveia · 2016Seia · 2017Serra da Estrela · 2022Penalva do Castelo · 2024

Burnt area
1,426ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
1day
18 Jul 2017 – 18 Jul 2017
Municipalities hit
7
freguesias
Started on
18 Jul
2017
Heat detections
6
in a single hotspot: 381 MW
Danger at start
36
High · FWI index
Average daily power
1.2GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 18 Jul18 Jul

How it evolved, day by day

18 Jul 2017 · 1,168 MW · 6

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

The weather it burned in

26°high
59km/h · peak gust
42%lowest humidity

It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 32 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.9% of the area of London (14 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. Vila Cortês da Serra 202 inhabitants · fire reached the centre where it started
    777 ha reached on 18 Jul
    71 %
  2. Juncais, Vila Ruiva e Vila Soeiro do Chão 553 inhabitants · 1.9 km from the centre
    255 ha
    13 %
  3. Carrapichana 180 inhabitants · fire reached the centre
    191 ha
    33 %
  4. União das Freguesias de Melo e Nabais 800 inhabitants · 1.9 km from the centre
    102 ha reached on 18 Jul
    7.0 %
  5. Vila Franca da Serra 238 inhabitants · 1.3 km from the centre
    46 ha
    4.2 %
  6. Mesquitela 203 inhabitants · 1.4 km from the centre
    41 ha
    2.4 %
  7. Ribamondego 262 inhabitants · 1.8 km from the centre
    16 ha reached on 18 Jul
    2.1 %

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

  • Other natural land77 %
  • Agricultural areas23 %

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

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2015
Built-up area6.4 ha
Residents≈ 150

Inside the perimeter there were about 6.4 hectares of built-up land and about 150 residents (GHSL 2015, 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 ICNF, this fire started on 18 July 2017 and burned 1,265 ha (the satellite measured 1,426 ha).

ICNF (Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas). This is the agency’s operational record: its figures may be revised when the year’s statistics are closed.

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)
18 Jul 26.5 °C 42 % 59 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
19 Jul after 23.1 °C 57 % 49 km/h 0.1 mm High 24
20 Jul after 26.0 °C 34 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
21 Jul after 26.2 °C 33 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
22 Jul after 26.8 °C 37 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
23 Jul after 30.9 °C 26 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
24 Jul after 30.7 °C 24 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
25 Jul after 31.5 °C 22 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
26 Jul after 33.5 °C 23 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
27 Jul after 32.7 °C 22 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
28 Jul after 31.9 °C 21 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 11 Jul 2017
After · 25 Jul 2017

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 18 July 2017 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
PM1030 µg/m³
161718192021
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 · 6Every 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 Portugal ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Gouveia fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 18 July 2017 and 18 July 2017: 1 day between the first and last image with fire. According to ICNF, it was detected on 18 July 2017 at 14:37 and declared extinguished on 19 July 2017.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 1,426 hectares (14.3 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 7 municipalities: Vila Cortês da Serra (777 ha, 71 %); Juncais, Vila Ruiva e Vila Soeiro do Chão (255 ha, 13 %); Carrapichana (191 ha, 33 %); União das Freguesias de Melo e Nabais (102 ha, 7.0 %); Vila Franca da Serra (46 ha, 4.2 %); Mesquitela (41 ha, 2.4 %); Ribamondego (16 ha, 2.1 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Vila Cortês da Serra 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 26.5 °C, humidity dropped to 42 % and gusts hit 59 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Portugal (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.

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How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 6 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • Compared with ICNF: 1,265 official ha against 1,426 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 2015, 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 (CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication). 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.