Find out where Europe is burning before you travel

The dots on the map are thermal anomalies picked up by the VIIRS instrument on the NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP satellites. Each satellite passes over the same spot only a few times a day, so a fire burning at 3am UTC might already be out by breakfast — and a fresh outbreak won't show up until the next overpass.

• Fire Radiative Power (FRP) — the higher the value in megawatts, the more intense the burn. Above 50 MW usually means a large, active fire front rather than a small brush fire.
• Clusters of points in a line usually mean a fire spreading with the wind, not several separate incidents.
• Isolated low-power points are often stubble burning, industrial furnaces or gas flares — not every detection is a forest fire.

To judge which way a fire will move you need wind data, which is why every country page includes an ECMWF wind forecast under the map.

• Call 112. It works across the whole EU, even without a SIM card or with a locked phone, and operators take calls in English.
• Don't turn off emergency alerts on your phone. Greece, Croatia, Italy and Spain send evacuation orders via Cell Broadcast — the message reaches you without mobile data and without a local SIM.
• Don't drive out to "check" whether a road is passable. Smoke can cut visibility to a few metres within minutes, and narrow coastal roads jam quickly once people start moving.
• Move away at a right angle to the wind, never uphill directly ahead of a fire front.
• Take documents, water and medication; leave everything else. Close car windows and vents, switch the air conditioning to recirculate.

If your hotel or campsite is running an evacuation, follow their plan — staff usually know the exit routes and assembly points better than a map app does.

Outside the peak season the risk isn't zero — Spain and Portugal have both seen major fires in March, after a dry winter.