PRIME Minister Pedro Sanchez has ended Spain’s national emergency after the forest fires in the Madrid and Avila areas were said to have been ‘stabilised’.
Sanchez made the announcement on Thursday during a visit to the command post in Avila.
The downgrade from level 3 to level 2 means that the coordination of the operation to extinguish fires returns to the Madrid and Castilla y Leon regions.
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“This is reassuring news,” Sanchez said, with both fire-hit areas continuing with manpower from the UME and the National Civil Protection System.
“We have to continue with the cooling and consolidation work with residents able to rest assured,” he added.
The operation has been ‘a reasonable success’, with a ‘very high effective response to the fire totalling over 150 hours of non-stop tireless work’.
Last Thursday, July 23, a national emergency was declared for the very first time as a result of forest fires.
It had only been activated previously on April 28, 2025 due to the nationwide power blackout.
Pedro Sanchez conveyed his ‘eternal gratitude’ to the professionals who have ‘risked their lives’ to face the flames and to the different city councils and regional governments collaborated in the coordination of the emergency.
“We come from different levels of the Administration but we have worked as if we were a single team,” Sanchez stated.
Despite the improvement in the situation in Madrid and Avila, the Prime Minister warned that ‘the emergency continues’ and that, ‘in any case, we will remain alert’.
He also pledged that the reckless start of fires will ‘not go unpunished’.
Meanwhile work continues to extinguish the forest fire that started on Saturday in the the Vall d’Uixo(Castellon province).
Around 9,644 hectares of land have been burned and 7,000 people are still confined to their homes, as the blaze is still not regarded as being stabilised.
It is expected that around a thousand residents will be allowed to return to their properties on Thursday.
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