Simitli fire, September 2025 Симитли · Bulgaria
The fire started on 4 September 2025 in Simitli, Bulgaria, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 119 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
Number 38 in Bulgaria in 2025, of 44.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 119ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 5days
- 4 Sept 2025 – 8 Sept 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 0
- municipalities
- Started on
- 4 Sept
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 24
- in a single hotspot: 0 MW
- Average daily power
- 38MW
- 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.
This area had burned before
No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.
What burned
- Scrub and transitional woodland71 %
- Other natural land26 %
- Coniferous forest3.3 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 100 %
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
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.
The smoke
CAMS · CopernicusOn 2 September 2025 the air beside the fire reached 35 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 20: 1.4 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 0Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 170 haSimitli СимитлиOctober 2019 · 2 days · 1 km away
- 156 haRila РилаSeptember 2025 · 5 days · 15 km away
- 1,646 haSimitli СимитлиAugust 2017 · 5 days · 24 km away
- 207 haDupnitsa ДупницаAugust 2024 · 4 days · 27 km away
- 149 haKresna КреснаJuly 2017 · 1 day · 27 km away
- 3,261 haStrumyarni СтрумяниJuly 2025 · 6 days · 33 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Simitli fire last?
- Copernicus dates it between 4 September 2025 and 8 September 2025: 5 days between the first and last image with fire.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 119 hectares (1.2 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Bulgaria (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 · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
- Start date: 29 August 2025 → 4 September 2025.
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: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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 ADM2 (Public Domain). 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.