Civil Guard officers in southern Spain have rescued a British couple found badly burned and semi-conscious at the bottom of a ravine after being trapped by the catastrophic Almería province wildfires.
The pair are believed to have been hiking near the heavily impacted village of Bédar when the fast-moving blaze swept through the region. Following their extraction in the early hours of Friday morning, they were rushed to a local hospital where they remain in intensive care with severe burns covering 40% of their bodies.
The rescue team located the hikers after hearing faint, distant cries for help while scanning the charred hillside. Responding officers described the discovery as a near-miraculous result of perseverance, noting that the couple had exerted a monumental effort to call out despite their critical physical state.
As the rescue unfolded, regional authorities announced that improved weather conditions had finally allowed firefighters to stabilize the 7,000-hectare blaze, lowering the operational alert level and permitting roughly 600 of the 1,500 evacuated residents to gradually return to their properties.
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While the immediate threat of the fire has receded, the tragedy has left a devastating toll of 12 confirmed fatalities, with local reports indicating that four of the victims are believed to be British nationals.
The aftermath has also ignited a sharp dispute between grieving families and local officials over the lack of automated emergency alerts. Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, whose 63-year-old Belgian father perished in the fire, fiercely rejected assertions from authorities that victims ignored orders to shelter in place or deviated from designated evacuation routes.
He stated that his father received no official phone warning and was only alerted to the danger upon physically seeing the approaching flames, by which point escape routes were already cut off.
Local residents backed these frustrations, criticizing the decision by emergency managers to withhold a localized mobile phone alert system during the crisis. Local officials defended the omission by arguing that a widespread text broadcast could have incited panic and complicated traffic management outside the immediate disaster zone, asserting instead that police used door-to-door notifications.
Read more about this topic: Spain: opposition warns of “highly demanding” weeks ahead in wildfire fight
The disaster stands as one of the deadliest wildfire events in modern Spanish history, fueled by a relentless European heatwave that has pushed regional temperatures past 104 degrees Fahrenheit and triggered parallel blazes across France and Portugal.
