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BO · Bolivia · –

San Miguel fire, October 2025 San Miguel

Out · last detection 23 Oct 2025, 17:11 UTC

The fire started on 8 October 2025 in San Miguel, Bolivia, and satellites saw it burning for 16 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 3,080 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 31 in Bolivia in 2025, of 32.

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
3,080ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
16days
8 Oct 2025 – 23 Oct 2025
Municipalities hit
1
municipalities
Started on
8 Oct
2025
Heat detections
280
in a single hotspot: 285 MW
Danger at start
30
High · FWI index
Average daily power
417MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Oct23 Oct
23 Oct 2025

How it evolved, day by day

8 Oct 2025 · 48 MW · 9 9 Oct 2025 · 508 MW · 22 10 Oct 2025 · 3,167 MW · 63 11 Oct 2025 · 958 MW · 43 12 Oct 2025 · 63 MW · 22 14 Oct 2025 · 268 MW · 33 15 Oct 2025 · 108 MW · 22 16 Oct 2025 · 39 MW · 15 17 Oct 2025 · 40 MW · 9 18 Oct 2025 · 13 MW · 9 20 Oct 2025 · 74 MW · 17 21 Oct 2025 · 130 MW · 15 23 Oct 2025 · 7 MW · 1
10 Oct 15 Oct 18 Oct 23 Oct

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
66km/h · peak gust
20%lowest humidity

It had gone one day without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 10.4 mm on 26 Oct.

This area had burned before

81% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 314 ha in 2018, 1,243 ha in 2019, 573 ha in 2020, 450 ha in 2021, 470 ha in 2022, 1,264 ha in 2023. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 2,496 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.9% of the area of London (31 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. San Miguel 15,329 inhabitants where it started
    3,105 ha reached on 8 Oct
    0.3 %

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)
8 Oct 31.4 °C 22 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
9 Oct 34.1 °C 20 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
10 Oct 37.5 °C 25 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
11 Oct 38.1 °C 28 % 53 km/h 0.2 mm Extreme 55
12 Oct 35.8 °C 40 % 66 km/h 0.2 mm Extreme 53
13 Oct 28.3 °C 55 % 24 km/h 2.7 mm Very low 5
14 Oct 35.7 °C 39 % 24 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 16
15 Oct 35.5 °C 43 % 41 km/h 0.3 mm High 31
16 Oct 37.7 °C 37 % 49 km/h 1.1 mm High 37
17 Oct 38.2 °C 37 % 55 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 43
18 Oct 34.1 °C 39 % 56 km/h 3.0 mm Very high 39
19 Oct 29.9 °C 36 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
20 Oct 34.5 °C 30 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
21 Oct 36.2 °C 32 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
22 Oct 36.4 °C 39 % 44 km/h 1.7 mm Very high 41
23 Oct 37.6 °C 37 % 42 km/h 0.3 mm High 31
24 Oct after 38.0 °C 35 % 58 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
25 Oct after 35.9 °C 42 % 70 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 58
26 Oct after 28.3 °C 60 % 37 km/h 10.4 mm Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 1 Oct 2025
After · 30 Oct 2025

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 11 October 2025 the air beside the fire reached 64 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 42: 2.8 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak64 µg/m³
Days over the guideline8 days
PM1065 µg/m³
Optical depth0.87
6 Oct11 Oct16 Oct21 Oct26 Oct
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 · 280Every 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 Bolivia

Frequently asked questions

How long did the San Miguel fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 October 2025 and 23 October 2025: 16 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 3,080 hectares (30.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered San Miguel (3,105 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.2 °C, humidity dropped to 20 % and gusts hit 66 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 55, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Bolivia (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: 119 · 110 · 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 119 · 110.

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. 280 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 ADM3 (Public Domain). 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.