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The fires near Ourém in northern Portugal have been blazing since Thursday
Photo: PAULO CUNHA/EPA
Around 2,800 firefighters fought numerous forest fires in central and northern Portugal on Sunday.
Some fires have been active since Thursday, and according to civil defense around 40 people have been slightly injured.
Because of the ongoing heat wave, the government ordered rescue workers to be on high alert.
Almost 250 forest fires were reported to have broken out on Friday and Saturday.
The largest fire has been blazing in the Ourém region north of Lisbon inland since Thursday.
Almost 700 firefighters were deployed there alone.
According to initial estimates, at least 1,500 hectares of vegetation and two houses were destroyed by the flames.
More than 700 soldiers were sent to the area.
A little further north, another fire has been blazing since Friday, breaking out in the municipality of Pombal, which lies on the border of Leiria and Santarém counties.
There, 450 firefighters fought the flames.
Around 40 firefighters and civilians were injured, but most of those affected were treated on site.
They suffered from symptoms of intoxication or exhaustion, as the national commander of civil protection, André Fernandes, announced on Sunday evening.
Government requests activation of EU civil protection mechanism
During this week the temperatures rose to over 40 degrees in some places and it is expected to get even hotter in the coming days.
Portugal's Prime Minister António Costa canceled a trip to Mozambique.
His government requested activation of the EU civil protection mechanism.
The Portuguese emergency services can then fall back on two fire-fighting aircraft stationed in Spain.
"We are facing an almost unprecedented meteorological situation," Fernandes said on Saturday.
In May, 97 percent of the country suffered from a severe drought.
Scientists see a connection between climate change and more extreme and frequent weather events such as heat waves and wildfires.
Dryer than ever before in the past 1200 years
According to a recent scientific study, the conditions for this drought are unprecedented even for more than a millennium.
Accordingly, the climate on the Iberian Peninsula is drier than ever before in the past 1200 years.
A US research team led by Caroline Ummenhofer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution published the results from weather data and computer models in the journal »Nature Geoscience«.
The cause was identified as the accumulation of large high-pressure areas in winter at the level of the Azores islands in the Atlantic, which belong to Portugal.
Such Azores highs can push the humid Atlantic weather further north, which brings plenty of rain to Portugal and Spain in normal winters.
ok/AFP