13 – 23 August 2026 · Europe
Every point of light is a place where a satellite measured heat on the ground. Press play and ten days pass in half a minute.
fires picked up in ten days
separate measurements behind them
typical wait between two looks
the ten largest
Croatia, Serbia and Spain carried the worst of it - but the one worth pausing on is Robertville. That is Belgian peat, and peat does not usually burn. The figures are upper bounds: a satellite measures how much ground is hot, which is always a little more than the ground that ends up burnt.
| Place | Hectares, at most | Burning for | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CivljaneCroatia | 19,715 | 10 days | dying down |
| IzbišteSerbia | 16,045 | 12 days | still burning |
| Casares de las HurdesSpain | 9,943 | 4 days | still burning |
| RrapëAlbania | 8,141 | 8 days | still burning |
| BelverPortugal | 6,541 | 3 days | out |
| MiloItaly | 5,015 | 12 days | still burning |
| AroucaPortugal | 3,832 | 4 days | still burning |
| RobertvilleBelgium | 2,790 | 3 days | out |
| VranjeSerbia | 2,440 | 2 days | still burning |
| MarinesSpain | 2,246 | 1 days | dying down |
Fires along the eastern front and large-scale stubble burning are excluded. Left in, they would top this list every week and they are not wildfires.
how quickly you would know
Two kinds of satellite watch Europe and they are good at opposite things. One never looks away but sees roughly. The other sees sharply but only passes overhead a few times a day. We use both, in that order.
From the moment the ground gets hot to the moment it reaches us. Nine times out of ten inside forty minutes.
A second satellite passes over and pins the location down to a few hundred metres, so you know not just that something is burning but where.
In these ten days 744 fires were caught by the fast satellite alone. Without it they would have gone unnoticed until the next sharp pass came round.
what we cannot promise
Nobody watches without interruption. Cloud blocks the view. Between two passes there is simply nothing. We measure those gaps rather than leave them out, because a safety tool that hides its blind spots is worse than no tool at all.
Twenty-six minutes is the median across Europe as a whole. Over any single site it is longer, and it changes with latitude and time of day. That number belongs on your own dashboard, not in a brochure.
