Meteorological wildfire index (simplified WRI) for Cantabria, based on live data at Santander. Includes regional zoom map, 7-day evolution and sub-indices of temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall.
Cantabria operates a regional wildfire emergency plan coordinated with the Spanish Directorate-General for Civil Protection. During the official high-danger season, stubble burning, bonfires and spark-producing machinery in woodland and the perimeter strip are banned by default.
See also the national overview with the FWI of all 17 Spanish autonomous communities.
Cantabria shares the Atlantic pattern with Asturias: most fires fall in the cold months, with scrub and pasture burns that get out of hand when a southerly sets in. The relief, with narrow valleys and steep slopes, speeds the spread uphill and complicates access for ground crews.
Three variables govern the rest: heat, low humidity and wind. Combined into a single indicator — atmospheric evaporative demand (reference ET0) above 4.5 mm a day, maximum gusts over 20 km/h and not a drop of rain — Cantabria averages 3 days a year of fire-prone weather. Few days, which is not the same as low risk: in humid climates a spell of dry southerly wind over scrub that has gone weeks without rain is enough. The month with most such days is July, followed by August.
The thermometer passes 30 °C on about 6 days a year and, between June and August, the longest dry run averages 11 consecutive days without appreciable rain. Across those three months about 233 mm fall in total. With figures this low the monthly split says little: the serious fire here is not brought by a long run of heat but by a short episode of dry wind over vegetation that has gone weeks without a soaking.
| Monthly mean | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days ≥ 30 °C | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.1 | 1.1 | 1.7 | 2.0 | 1.0 | 0.2 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Risk days | 0.0 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.4 | 0.3 | 0.4 | 0.9 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
| Rain (mm) | 142 | 131 | 118 | 100 | 92 | 104 | 63 | 66 | 98 | 110 | 155 | 121 |
Meteorology explains when a place can burn, not why it does. In Spain more than nine in ten wildfires are of human origin, between deliberate ignitions and negligence — agricultural burns that escape, machinery throwing sparks, campfires badly put out — and only a minority are caused by lightning. Nor do these figures cover the state of the fuel: two summers with identical heat behave very differently depending on how much rain fell in spring, because a wet spring grows grasses that later dry out and act as a fuse. The indicator also needs reading with one caution: being built on heat and dryness of the air, it captures the summer fire well and falls short on winter episodes of dry mountain wind, which on the Cantabrian coast and in the northwest burn with the thermometer at modest values.
The indicator above is meteorological: it combines temperature, relative humidity, wind and rainfall accumulated over the last 72 hours forecast for the reference point in Cantabria. It does not incorporate the real state of the vegetation or the drought history, and so it does not replace the official index each autonomous community publishes, nor the prohibitions in force during high-danger periods. Faced with a column of smoke, the number that matters is 112.
