The author says Spanish wildfires are fewer but more severe because fuel—not sparks—sets intensity, and old rural practice used small or even set fires plus local cost–value judgment to keep dry vegetation down.

Permits, “protected” trees, and impact studies are blamed for emptying the countryside (España vaciada) and blocking clearance; public land is said to have no real economic calculation, so officials chase every small blaze for votes and leave worse fuel loads.

The proposed fix is less collectivist regulation and more owner-led trial and error—not more rules or firefighting budgets.

Why do we still have wildfires raging in Spain? With all the regulations, restrictions, and resources poured into fire prevention and fire fighting, surely wildfires would have disappeared or at least they would have been controlled to the point of not causing damage. Is the climate changing so rapidly that the government cannot keep up? Are the resources used by authorities insufficient, or the restrictions too lax?

To answer these questions we need to look at them calmly, which is difficult when you are talking about something that can take everything from you, something that causes such strong emotions in everyone. But it is an important analysis to make as wildfires, at least in Spain, are going down only in number. Those that do happen are increasing in severity.

In the old times, wildfires happened a lot more frequently than people assume. After all, there was no electricity. All heating and cooking was done using fires. And wildfires also happened due to natural phenomena such as lightning. So both completely untouched ecosystems and humans in the natural world had to learn to live with wildfires.

And they did. A testament to this is the amount of rural lands still with vegetation. Untouched ecosystems developed a balance in which herbivores avoided excessive vegetation accumulating. People dealt with wildfires by calculating how much to spend on risk and where, and how much on fire fighting. This meant knowing roughly how valuable a land was and the cost of a fire. This meant small, low-intensity fires would either be left to burn or even be started on purpose.

These fires would clear dry vegetation, avoid excessive amounts of it and introduce nutrients into the soil. Far from being destructive, they would add value to land. So it would cost far less to let these fires burn than to spend resources fighting them.

When fires got either too big, or had too much vegetation to burn or were close to valuable parts........

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