Wildfire risk when buying a home in Spain: forest mass, burnt areas and live fire by satellite

A home can sit in a municipality with barely any fire history and still have scrubland right against the fence. Or the opposite: a town with a heavy record and a house deep in the urban core, far from everything. And there is a third scenario no historical dataset captures: the hillside next door burning this very week. That is why the Hogarfax report no longer relies on statistics alone — it cross-checks your exact plot against official forest cartography, the perimeters of real fires from recent years, and satellite active-fire detections updated several times a day.

The four signals the report combines

When you analyse an address or cadastral reference, Hogarfax locates the exact parcel and checks it against four independent official sources. Hogarfax was the first property analysis tool in Spain to combine them, and remains the only one that adds near-real-time active fire detection.

• Forest mass (Forest Map of Spain · MITECO): how far the plot is from forest land, what the vegetation is and how flammable it is. This is the wildland-urban interface, the base signal of the analysis: the closer and the more flammable, the higher the alert level.
• Real recent wildfires (EFFIS · Copernicus): the perimeters of areas actually burnt in the last 5 years, mapped by satellite by the EU's Copernicus programme. If your plot sits inside a burnt area — or the fire came within a few hundred metres — the report says so, with date and hectares.
• ACTIVE fire (NASA FIRMS): thermal hotspots detected by NASA's VIIRS and MODIS satellites over the last few days, updated several times a day. If there is fire burning near the property you are analysing, you see it in the report and on the map, as pulsing red markers.
• Municipal history (EGIF · MITECO): the official statistics of fires and minor fires for the municipality, as background context.

Why near-real-time matters: the Almería case

In July 2026 a wildfire devastated some 7,000 hectares across Los Gallardos, Bédar and Lubrín (Almería), with mass evacuations and fatalities; it was the worst on record in Andalusia. The historical statistics for those municipalities showed barely a handful of fires in a decade: no archive would have warned you. Copernicus perimeters and NASA hotspots did. A report generated today for a plot in that area shows the burnt perimeter with its date and size, the exact distance to the fire's edge, and any thermal hotspots still active. That is the difference between describing the past and telling you what is happening.

What it looks like in the report

The wildfire card always opens with the most urgent signal. If there is active fire you will see something like: "⚠ ACTIVE FIRE: NASA FIRMS detected 13 thermal fire hotspots about 1,400 m away in the last few days". Then the recent fire, if any: "A wildfire recorded in July 2026 (~4,400 ha) burned to about 260 m from this plot, according to EFFIS (Copernicus)". And after that, the distance to forest mass, its fuel model and the municipal context. In the interactive viewer you can switch on the forest mass, recent burnt areas and active fire layers and see it all over the real parcel.

The report weighs the four signals with in-house criteria, calibrated against real cases across Spain: the absence of recent fires does not erase the risk of having a pine forest right against the fence. And if the plot sits inside a burnt area, the report adds what comes after the fire: bare soil, erosion and runoff risk with the first heavy rains.

What to check on the ground

• Distance between the building and continuous vegetation or forest mass.
• Clearing and maintenance of neighbouring plots.
• Number and width of access routes for evacuation and emergency services.
• Terrain slope and orientation relative to prevailing winds.
• Availability of hydrants, water tanks and municipal prevention plans.
• Roof materials, enclosures, gutters and combustible outdoor elements.
• If the area burned recently: soil condition, slopes and restoration measures.

Sources and limits

The sources are public and verifiable: the Forest Map of Spain and EGIF (MITECO), EFFIS burnt-area perimeters (Copernicus, European Union) and NASA FIRMS thermal detections. Active-fire hotspots are satellite detections not confirmed on the ground — they can correspond to authorised agricultural burns — which is why the report states their confidence level. None of this replaces a technical inspection or self-protection plans: its value is making sure no relevant territorial risk catches you unaware before you sign.