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Vera fire, 29 April 2025 Vera

Out · last detection 3 May 2025, 17:49 UTC

The fire started on 29 April 2025 in Vera, Argentina, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,697 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 189th largest in Santa Fe since 2016 (of 252 with a page). Number 167 in Argentina in 2025, of 206.

Compare with…
Burnt area
1,697ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
29 Apr 2025 – 3 May 2025
Municipalities hit
1
departments
Started on
29 Apr
2025
Heat detections
78
in a single hotspot: 67 MW
Danger at start
21
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
255MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 29 Apr3 May
3 May 2025

How it evolved, day by day

29 Apr 2025 · 140 MW · 16 30 Apr 2025 · 8 MW · 3 1 May 2025 · 1,106 MW · 51 2 May 2025 · 12 MW · 3 3 May 2025 · 12 MW · 5
29 Apr 30 Apr 1 May 2 May 3 May

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

The weather it burned in

30°high
40km/h · peak gust
27%lowest humidity

It had gone 21 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.8 mm on 5 May.

This area had burned before

91% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 248 ha in 2018, 1,061 ha in 2020, 772 ha in 2021, 23 ha in 2022, 142 ha in 2023, 710 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 1,541 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.1% of the area of London (17 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. Vera where it started
    1,695 ha reached on 29 Apr
    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)
29 Apr 26.5 °C 28 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
30 Apr 27.6 °C 27 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
1 May 29.9 °C 31 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
2 May 21.8 °C 59 % 19 km/h 0.6 mm Moderate 14
3 May 28.1 °C 50 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
4 May after 27.6 °C 60 % 34 km/h 0.2 mm Moderate 18
5 May after 26.3 °C 67 % 22 km/h 1.8 mm Very low 5

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 22 Apr 2025
After · 10 May 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 3 May 2025 the air beside the fire reached 18 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak18 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1019 µg/m³
Optical depth0.32
27282930123456
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 · 78Every 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 Argentina ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Vera fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 29 April 2025 and 3 May 2025: 5 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 1,697 hectares (17.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Vera (1,695 ha, 0.1 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.9 °C, humidity dropped to 27 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 27, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Argentina (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 · 100 · 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.

No changes since 24 October 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.

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 · 100.

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. 78 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 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). 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.