How long did the Ortíz fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 9 January 2026 to 13 January 2026 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 January 2026 to 13 January 2026.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,634 hectares (16.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Ortíz (1,644 ha, 0.4 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, class 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.

VE · Venezuela · 2026-01-09 → 2026-01-13

Ortíz fire, 9 January 2026 Ortíz

Out · last detection 13 Jan 2026, 05:37 UTC

The fire started on 9 January 2026 in Ortíz, Venezuela, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,634 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 334th largest in Guárico since 2016 (of 421 with a page). Number 345 in Venezuela in 2026, of 400.

The power measured by the satellite is low (20.0 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ortíz · 2021 Ortíz · 2023 Ortíz · 2020 Ortíz · 2023

Burnt area: 1,634ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 5days; 9 Jan 2026 – 13 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 9 Jan; 2026
Heat detections: 23; in a single hotspot: 20 MW
Danger at start: 34; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 34MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 9 Jan13 Jan

Play back 13 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

9 Jan 10 Jan 11 Jan 12 Jan 13 Jan

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

40km/h · peak gust

28%lowest humidity

It had gone 35 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

69% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 712 ha in 2016, 153 ha in 2020, 583 ha in 2021, 19 ha in 2023, 65 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,132 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1% of the area of London (16 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

Ortíz 23,755 inhabitants where it started

1,644 ha reached on 9 Jan

0.4 %

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 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
10 Jan	36.7 °C	37 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
11 Jan	38.2 °C	28 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
12 Jan	37.9 °C	29 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
13 Jan	37.3 °C	34 %	40 km/h	0.8 mm	High 29
14 Jan after	37.1 °C	34 %	41 km/h	0.1 mm	High 33
15 Jan after	36.8 °C	36 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
16 Jan after	38.5 °C	26 %	43 km/h	0.2 mm	Very high 41
17 Jan after	37.1 °C	33 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
18 Jan after	37.2 °C	29 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
19 Jan after	38.5 °C	24 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
20 Jan after	39.5 °C	20 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
21 Jan after	39.4 °C	17 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 45
22 Jan after	38.9 °C	20 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
23 Jan after	38.5 °C	23 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 2 Jan 2026

After · 20 Jan 2026

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.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 14 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 11 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak11 µg/m³

Days over the guideline0 days

PM1012 µg/m³

Optical depth0.24

8910111213141516

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 · 23Every 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 Venezuela ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ortíz fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 9 January 2026 to 13 January 2026 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 10 January 2026 to 13 January 2026.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,634 hectares (16.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Ortíz (1,644 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 34, class 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 ›

Protección Civil ↗

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Start date: 10 January 2026 → 9 January 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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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 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 10 January 2026 to 13 January 2026. 23 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 2025, 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