La Macarena fire, 27 January 2022 La Macarena
The fire started on 27 January 2022 in La Macarena, Colombia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,769 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 179th largest in Meta since 2016 (of 257 with a page). Number 121 in Colombia in 2022, of 160.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 1,769ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 9days
- 27 Jan 2022 – 4 Feb 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- municipalities
- Started on
- 27 Jan
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 58
- in a single hotspot: 251 MW
- Danger at start
- 23
- High · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 158MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 10 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 5.8 mm on 5 Feb.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,781 ha reached on 27 Jan0.2 %
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 2020Inside 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
Official record
According to UNGRD, a fire of 1,400 ha was recorded in La Macarena on 31 January 2022 (the satellite measured 1,769 ha). The record has no coordinates, so it was matched by municipality and date. The two figures differ a lot, so these may not be exactly the same fire: take them as nearby records.
- La Macarena 31 January 2022 1,400 ha
UNGRD (Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres), emergencias 2019-2022 en datos.gov.co (CC BY-SA 4.0). 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Jan | 34.6 °C | 33 % | 37 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 23 |
| 28 Jan | 35.7 °C | 29 % | 39 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 29 Jan | 36.8 °C | 27 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 30 Jan | 35.0 °C | 32 % | 56 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 37 |
| 31 Jan | 35.0 °C | 30 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 1 Feb | 35.3 °C | 27 % | 47 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 34 |
| 2 Feb | 35.9 °C | 28 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 3 Feb | 34.2 °C | 35 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
| 4 Feb | 33.1 °C | 39 % | 29 km/h | 0.2 mm | High 25 |
| 5 Feb after | 32.6 °C | 48 % | 34 km/h | 5.8 mm | Very low 4 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 58Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,941 haLa Macarena19 February 2024 · 8 days · 5 km away
- 2,263 haLa Macarena4 February 2020 · 15 days · 7 km away
- 3,189 haLa MacarenaDecember 2021 · 18 days · 18 km away
- 20,776 haLa Macarena22 January 2022 · 14 days · 19 km away
- 2,827 haLa Macarena8 February 2020 · 15 days · 19 km away
- 2,727 haLa Macarena21 January 2022 · 14 days · 20 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the La Macarena fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 January 2022 and 4 February 2022: 9 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,769 hectares (17.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered La Macarena (1,781 ha, 0.2 %).
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 56 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, class High.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Colombia (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: 123 · 119 · 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.
- Matched to the official record from UNGRD.
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 58 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- Compared with UNGRD: 1,400 official ha against 1,769 ha of perimeter; similar, but with reservations.
- 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.
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 (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 from each country’s official figure.