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VE · Venezuela · –

Pedro Camejo fire, 16 January 2026 Pedro Camejo

Out · last detection 18 Jan 2026, 18:29 UTC

The fire started on 16 January 2026 in Pedro Camejo, Venezuela, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,975 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 129 in Venezuela in 2026, of 404.

GWIS near-real-time perimeter, from the layer that changed in October 2025: this fire is not compared with fires from earlier years, because since then the GWIS layer gives more and larger perimeters.

Burnt area
2,975ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
4days
16 Jan 2026 – 19 Jan 2026
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
16 Jan
2026
Heat detections
52
in a single hotspot: 96 MW
Danger at start
10
Low · FWI index
Average daily power
392MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 16 Jan19 Jan
18 Jan 2026

How it evolved, day by day

16 Jan 2026 · 1,068 MW · 31 17 Jan 2026 · 67 MW · 13 18 Jan 2026 · 41 MW · 8
16 Jan 17 Jan 18 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

34°high
39km/h · peak gust
46%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

53% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 1,456 ha in 2016, 256 ha in 2020. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,578 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.9% of the area of London (30 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. Pedro Camejo where it started
    2,991 ha reached on 16 Jan
    0.1 %

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 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)
16 Jan 34.1 °C 51 % 39 km/h 0.1 mm Low 10
17 Jan 33.6 °C 50 % 37 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 14
18 Jan 33.1 °C 51 % 35 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 15
19 Jan 33.9 °C 46 % 25 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 14
20 Jan after 33.7 °C 47 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
21 Jan after 34.1 °C 44 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
22 Jan after 34.0 °C 39 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm High 22
23 Jan after 34.5 °C 43 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
24 Jan after 34.5 °C 44 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
25 Jan after 31.5 °C 57 % 37 km/h 0.2 mm High 21
26 Jan after 33.1 °C 50 % 36 km/h 0.2 mm High 23
27 Jan after 33.5 °C 48 % 41 km/h 0.8 mm High 22
28 Jan after 34.0 °C 44 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
29 Jan after 33.8 °C 49 % 33 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 21

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 9 Jan 2026
After · 26 Jan 2026

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 26 January 2026 the air beside the fire reached 24 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak24 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1025 µg/m³
Optical depth0.32
14 Jan17 Jan20 Jan23 Jan26 Jan
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 · 52Every 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 Venezuela

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Pedro Camejo fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 16 January 2026 and 19 January 2026: 4 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 2,975 hectares (29.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Pedro Camejo (2,991 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.1 °C, humidity dropped to 46 % and gusts hit 39 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 15, class Moderate.
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

Satellite cross-check

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

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 911.

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. 52 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.