Spain Wildfires Trigger National Emergency as UK Holidaymakers Risk Losing Money if They Cancel Trips

Spain has declared a national emergency over wildfires burning in parts of Madrid and Ávila, with tens of thousands moved out of their homes and at least one person dead. British travellers watching the pictures and thinking about pulling out of a booking should know that the Foreign Office has not advised against going, which in most cases leaves the cost of cancelling with the traveller rather than the operator.

The fires are not confined to Spain. More than 300,000 people have left their homes across Spain and France combined, with the worst of it across Gironde and Landes in the French south west, near Bordeaux.

The Spanish figures come from the country's interior ministry and the French from theirs, and the gap between the two is worth seeing laid out.

The Madrid region accounts for over 29,000 of those moved out, with another 20,000 confined to their homes. Ávila province, north west of the capital, adds upwards of 25,000 and 8,000 respectively. The death was in Manises, near Valencia, away from the emergency zone.

Spain has now lost more than 300,000 acres to fire this year against a 10-year average of 250,000, according to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. In France, the total stands above 242,000 acres, which the interior ministry describes as a historic record. The Gironde blaze was still not contained by Sunday morning, with 2,500 firefighters deployed against it.

What the Foreign Office Has Actually Said

Its advice was updated on 24 July and remains current. It records the national emergency in Madrid and Ávila, notes reports of fires in other inland areas, and tells anyone caught in one to follow the instructions of local emergency services and call 112 if they need help.

What it does not do is advise against travel to Spain or to any part of it. That absence is not an oversight, and it carries more weight for a holiday budget than anything in the coverage.

Whether the Money Comes Back

Cancellation rights for a package holiday sit in regulation 12(7) of the Package Travel Regulations 2018, and they turn on a test with two limbs rather than on how alarming the news looks.

A traveller may end a package before departure without paying a termination fee where unavoidable and extraordinary circumstances arise at the destination or close by, and where they significantly affect either the holiday itself or the journey to it. Both halves have to be satisfied. Fires several hundred miles from a booked resort will struggle on the second.

Official advice against travel is powerful evidence that the first limb is met, and a county court accepted exactly that argument in a case against an online operator during the pandemic. Without it, a claim rests on showing the fires genuinely disrupt that particular trip, which is a far harder case for somebody booked into Majorca or the Costa del Sol than for somebody booked into Ávila.

Two limits are worth knowing before anyone telephones an operator. The regulations cover packages only, so a separately booked flight and hotel fall outside them entirely and are governed by whatever the airline and the hotel choose to offer. And courts have indicated that an operator need not cancel until departure is close, perhaps only days away, so a decision taken now forfeits money that patience might have protected.