Some 600 Portuguese firefighters are trying Tuesday morning to come to the end of a fire which broke out the day before in the tourist region of the Algarve (South), causing the evacuation of about sixty people, we have learned from the emergency services.
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A firefighter was hospitalized for burns and two others were assisted on site for inhalation of fumes, a spokesperson for the regional civil protection command told AFP.
3000 hectares affected
The fire started in the early hours of Monday in the town of Castro Marim, near the Spanish border, and had been temporarily contained before igniting again in the afternoon, reaching in the evening a perimeter of a thirty kilometers and an area then estimated at some 3000 hectares.
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According to local media, the fire damaged at least one farm building on hills covered with orchards and brush.
The flames then progressed south, towards the coast, prompting authorities to stop traffic on the highway that crosses the Algarve from east to west.
This road axis remained cut Tuesday morning, while the fire progressed "
with intensity
" in an area of pine forest towards the city of Tavira, civil protection said.
The extended fire alarm
Faced with the scorching temperatures that have affected Portugal and neighboring Spain as well as other countries in the Mediterranean basin, the Lisbon government decided on Monday to extend the fire alarm in force since Friday in most of the territory by 48 hours.
The fires that are increasing across the globe, as in recent weeks in Greece, Turkey and Algeria, are associated with various phenomena anticipated by scientists due to global warming.
Struck in 2017 by the deadliest forest fires in its history which had killed more than a hundred people, Portugal had so far experienced a relatively calm summer on the fire front.