How long did the Simón Planas fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 7 March 2020 to 29 March 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 March 2020 to 22 March 2020.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,544 hectares (25.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Simón Planas (2,560 ha, 3.0 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very 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 · 2020-03-07 → 2020-03-29

Simón Planas fire, 7 March 2020 Simón Planas

Out · last detection 29 Mar 2020, 17:52 UTC

The fire started on 7 March 2020 in Simón Planas, Venezuela, and satellites saw it burning for 23 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,544 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

Number 127 in Venezuela in 2020, of 400.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Simón Planas · 2020 Anzoátegui · 2020

Burnt area: 2,544ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 23days; 7 Mar 2020 – 29 Mar 2020
Municipalities hit: 1; municipalities
Started on: 7 Mar; 2020
Heat detections: 102; in a single hotspot: 92 MW
Danger at start: 38; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 58MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 7 Mar29 Mar

Play back 29 Mar 2020

How it evolved, day by day

7 Mar 14 Mar 17 Mar 20 Mar 25 Mar 29 Mar

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

37°high

47km/h · peak gust

17%lowest humidity

It had gone 17 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.9 mm on 3 Apr.

This area had burned before

1% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 15 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.6% of the area of London (25 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

Simón Planas 35,802 inhabitants where it started

2,560 ha reached on 7 Mar

3.0 %

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 2020

Built-up area1.9 ha

Residents≈ 200

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.9 hectares of built-up land and about 200 residents (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

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)
7 Mar	34.7 °C	24 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
8 Mar	35.1 °C	26 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 43
9 Mar	32.9 °C	27 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
10 Mar	33.2 °C	29 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
11 Mar	33.9 °C	33 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
12 Mar	32.0 °C	33 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
13 Mar	35.6 °C	30 %	33 km/h	0.1 mm	High 37
14 Mar	34.8 °C	27 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
15 Mar	34.3 °C	26 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 38
16 Mar	34.6 °C	23 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
17 Mar	34.7 °C	24 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 42
18 Mar	34.6 °C	24 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
19 Mar	34.4 °C	25 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
20 Mar	33.5 °C	26 %	45 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
21 Mar	34.6 °C	24 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 44
22 Mar	34.5 °C	24 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 41
23 Mar	33.7 °C	31 %	31 km/h	0.6 mm	High 31
24 Mar	35.4 °C	29 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
25 Mar	33.9 °C	34 %	29 km/h	0.2 mm	High 33
26 Mar	35.1 °C	29 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
27 Mar	36.8 °C	19 %	47 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 48
28 Mar	35.6 °C	17 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
29 Mar	35.1 °C	24 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 47
30 Mar after	36.4 °C	23 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 46
31 Mar after	31.9 °C	35 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
1 Apr after	34.9 °C	30 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
2 Apr after	32.2 °C	41 %	39 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
3 Apr after	30.9 °C	54 %	48 km/h	3.9 mm	Low 8

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 29 Feb 2020

After · 5 Apr 2020

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.

Detections table · 102Every 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 Simón Planas fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 7 March 2020 to 29 March 2020 (23 days). The perimeter dates it from 14 March 2020 to 22 March 2020.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,544 hectares (25.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Simón Planas (2,560 ha, 3.0 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.8 °C, humidity dropped to 17 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 48, class Very 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 · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Last day with fire: 22 March 2020 → 29 March 2020.
25 October 2026 Start date: 14 March 2020 → 7 March 2020.

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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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 14 March 2020 to 22 March 2020. 102 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 2020, 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