The fire capital of the EU

“Arsonist country” is the new podcast series by DIVERGENTE (release: first half of 2025). When we embarked on the project in 2023, we applied to the Journalismfund Europe, a European organization that funds investigative journalism projects. We presented the general idea: we wanted to interview people tried for arson to understand what led them to start wildfires. We explained how we intended to reach these people: by reviewing court cases, to identify where to go knocking. And we highlighted the relevance of the subject: “Arsonists are presented as criminals in political discourse and the media. However, we know little about their real motives. We believe that hearing from arsonists themselves will help us to better understand the wildfire phenomenon. We want to understand what drives so many people to set deliberate fires. And we believe that answering these questions will uncover something bigger”. All this just in the first paragraph.

They didn’t accept our proposal. The panel commented: “It’s an interesting story, but we aren’t sure that arsonists should be treated like victims.” A bit irritated, months later we tried our luck again and slipped a response to the panel into our narrative: “The objective is not to portray arsonists as victims rather than criminals, but to try to understand what leads someone to set a fire.” This time, we got our wish.

But we then stumbled across another hurdle: the lack of data about fires in the European Union (EU). In 2013, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) produced a code table to harmonize all causes of fire across different countries which, in theory, makes such comparisons possible. However, each Member State has continued to catalogue fires using their own systems (see the examples of Portugal and Spain.) In Spain, as in most EU countries, the numbers are out of date—the last published data is from 2016, nearly a decade ago. Portugal is an exception to the rule: the Portuguese Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF, acronym in Portuguese), publishes information annually about all fires occurring during that year with variables that include, but are not limited to, the date, time, location and cause.

The inexistence of comparable data makes it impossible to respond to questions such as “Are the origins of fires in Portugal different from those in other parts of the EU?”, “What EU country has the highest incidence of arson?”

We thought this hole in the data was, in and of itself, a story worth telling. Working in partnership with the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) and the Spanish digital daily newspaper El Confidencial, we considered what to do with the little information we had available. In this analysis we confirmed that between 2011 and 2023 Portugal was the country that burned the most across the EU, in absolute and relative terms. 16.05% of Portugal’s territory burned in the last 12 years, according to the data collected by EFFIS. In second place other southern states follow: Greece (3.8%), Italy (3.2%), Croatia (3%), Spain (2.8%) and Cyprus (2.7%). The percentage of burned area in the remaining countries is lower than 1%.

But if Portugal has the highest burned area, what is the leading cause of these fires? That question we could answer: arson. The voluntary act of people intentionally setting fires to cause harm is responsible for more than 50% of the land burned in recent years.

These numbers give strength to our argument, tell us that there is a problem the country refuses to see. They reveal that there is a story to tell, even when public policymakers have little or nothing to say on the matter. “Arson is the leading cause of burned area in Portugal. Why might that be?” We asked this question time and again, to Luís Ribeiro, the head of the SEPNA in Viseu (the National Guard environmental protection agency responsible for investigating the causes of fires in Portugal); to João Pinho, the head of the Wildfires Programme at the ICNF; and to Tiago Oliveira, the president of the Agency for Integrated Wildfire Management. They all shrugged off the question; it felt like it had never crossed their minds, as if arson was a minor issue.

This reaction matched the Government’s strategy—a strategy that has focused above all on the prevention and criminalization of waste and vegetation management and agricultural burnings fires, ones caused by negligence, following the large fires that afflicted Pedrógão Grande and the Central Region in 2017. Because statistics can tell multiple stories. And if we look solely at the number of fires, and not the burned area, fires caused by agricultural, vegetation and waste management are the leading cause of wildfires in Portugal.

An alternate gaze on the statistics helped us to see a different reality to the one political leaders present. A focus on other indicators—analysing the burned area instead of the number of fires—meant we could ask questions to which there appeared to be no answers. 

It is the first time that DIVERGENTE ventures into the world of podcasts. We use the six-part series to not only give you a portrayal of the arsonists, but also to tell the story of a country that abandoned a large part of its interior, and by doing so tossed aside and turned its back on part of its population. The series will end with a snapshot of a judicial system, mental health services and territorial management in disarray.

To try to explain the statistics and find answers to our questions, we talked to the police, to firefighters, doctors, forestry technicians, politicians and, most importantly, to arsonists—and their families, neighbours and friends. And nowhere did we find crowds calling for these people to be “strung up on a tree” or “burned alive”. Proximity does this: it helps us to understand the seemingly inexplicable; and humanizes those who, from afar, may seem like monsters. 

An attitude at odds with that of the Portuguese Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, who promised a firm hand. In a statement to the country during the fires in September 2024, he declared, “I want to be clear that we will spare no effort to hold those responsible to account. We cannot forgive those who have committed the unforgivable. We cannot forgive criminal attitudes that are the source of many of the fires seen over recent days. We know that natural phenomena and acts of negligence converge to bring about forest fires. But it happens too often to be a coincidence. And Portuguese men and women, therefore, need to know that the State will seek out those responsible for these atrocities.”

Perhaps this distance is the problem with many of the policies designed to tackle fires. Policies that have no place for the person who on a hot day goes out and sets fire to everything around them. They offer even less space to understand what could bring a person to do such a thing. Because, deep down, trying to understand what leads someone to leave their house to set fire to the forest is to submit the country to an x-ray and receive a complex, difficult to treat diagnosis in return.

*All the data referred to in this article will be presented in detail in the series website “Arsonist Country”.