FOUR British nationals found dead inside their own car were cut off as they tried to drive clear of a wildfire tearing through the Almeria countryside, officials believe.
Officials believe they were British, based on the number plate and right-hand-drive configuration of the vehicle, though this has not yet been formally confirmed.
The fire moved with what regional emergencies chief Antonio Sanz called an ‘extraordinary speed,’ driven by strong wind through terrain riddled with ravines.
“It may be that, searching for a way out too late, they walked into a trap — a dead-end ravine with no exit,” Sanz said.
Seven more people died in a separate group of nine who were trying to find their own way out on foot.
Two of the nine survived. One is Spanish, and the rest are thought to be British or Belgian, according to Sanz.
Sanz said the deaths in both groups came as people searched for exits that were not the official evacuation routes.
“These are not recommendations, they are instructions,” he said, urging residents to follow only routes explicitly authorised by the emergency services.
The area is scattered with isolated homes and cut through by deep ravines that emergency vehicles could not reach.
The fire is believed to have started in a roadside ditch after a power cable came down, before the wind drove it rapidly into the surrounding hillsides.
The provisional death toll from the fire has reached 11, with officials warning it could rise to 12.
Andalucian president Juanma Moreno said 19 people remained unaccounted for on Friday morning, though separate emergency-service tallies put the figure as high as 23.
It is already the deadliest wildfire of the century in Andalucia, matching the toll of the 2005 Riba de Saelices fire in Guadalajara.
The blaze broke out on the afternoon of Thursday, July 9, near Los Gallardos, an inland village in the hills behind the British expat resort of Mojacar on the Costa de Almeria.
It has since torn through the municipalities of Los Gallardos, Bedar and Antas, forcing evacuees to shelter in the nearby towns of Lubrin and Garrucha.
Ten of the 11 confirmed victims are believed to be foreign nationals, Sanz said, though formal identification is still pending.
Eight people have been injured, four of them seriously with burns and smoke inhalation.
The most serious cases were taken to Almeria’s Torrecardenas Hospital, with the worst flown by helicopter to the specialist burns unit at the Virgen del Rocio Hospital in Seville.
The blaze has burned through 31.5 sq km of countryside.
More than 600 people have been evacuated, including the entire municipality of Bedar and the Miraflores tourist complex.
Of those, 193 are sleeping in shelters set up at a theatre in Lubrin and a sports centre in Garrucha, with the rest staying with family or friends.
By Friday morning the response included 220 troops from the Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME) — the Spanish army’s dedicated disaster-response unit — 160 Guardia Civil officers, and four water-bombing aircraft deployed by the environment ministry.
Angel Collado, the mayor of Bedar, said he personally knew several of the dead, some of whom he had married at the town hall despite their being ‘of a different nationality to ours.’
Collado said his own escape route out of the village was cut off by flames, forcing him to redirect fleeing residents towards Lubrin instead.
The Guardia Civil has opened a family-liaison office in Garrucha to help identify the dead and trace those still missing, using DNA samples from relatives.
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