A Minha Terra · Wildfire Susceptibility Map
The data shows where fire is more likely to thrive. This year, you can check your land before summer arrives.
For the first time in Portugal, a 10-metre satellite map shows this year's fire conditions for every parcel in the country. Scroll to see what the data reveals about where you are.
How does fire develop in Portugal?
Fire follows terrain, slope, and landscape. The patterns are in the data, and they repeat, season after season.
What can we expect this year?
A new satellite layer built for 2026 measures fuel load across every parish in Portugal. Here is what it shows that the structural map does not.
What does this mean for your land?
Real places, real data, and one clear action every landowner can take before fire season arrives.
Scroll through to find the answers.
How does fire develop in Portugal?
The same land. Burning again and again.
Twenty years of fire perimeter data reveals the same zones appearing on the map, season after season. The pattern is visible at every scale.
The map on the right shows every major fire perimeter recorded in Portugal since 2001. The darkest areas have burned multiple times. The overlap is not a coincidence.
Certain landscapes are structurally predisposed to burn. The terrain, the vegetation type, the way land has been managed over decades. It all compounds over time. This is visible from the national level down to individual parcels.
Five years of perimeters. The overlap is not a coincidence.
Each year is shown as a separate layer. The most recent burns are darkest. Earlier years lighter grey. The darkest zones have burned within the last five years.
The zones where all five layers overlap are the most persistently exposed land in Portugal. Some of these areas have burned in three of the last five years.
This is not a prediction. It’s a record of where the conditions to burn exist, and keep returning, year after year.
The pattern has a name: structural fire risk.
Portugal’s national classification, published by ICNF, maps where landscape conditions make fire most likely. Terrain, slope, vegetation type, land use history.
The map divides Portugal into risk zones from low to very high. Interior regions, particularly in the north and centre, carry persistent structural risk shaped by decades of landscape change.
Overlay it with the burn perimeters and the alignment is striking. This is a solid, science-based foundation and the essential starting point for every landowner.
What can we expect this year?
What the satellite sees on the ground this season. Every parish in Portugal.
Fire susceptibility measures how likely land is to burn this season. A major factor is fuel load: how green the vegetation is now, and how dry it will become by summer. It’s a factor the structural map can’t update yearly.
A Minha Terra’s 2026 susceptibility layer is the first yearly map of fire conditions covering every parish in Portugal at 10-metre satellite resolution. It’s built to complement the structural classification, not replace it — to show what’s true this season alongside what’s true every year.
The layer captures fuel load, vegetation moisture, and land cover change. Updated for this season, across all 3,049 parishes. The susceptibility score shows where this season’s conditions concentrate.
The structural map shows where Portugal burns on average. The seasonal layer shows where 2026 is different — and why.
The two maps agree on Portugal's structural fire geography: the interior north and centre carry more risk than the coast and the Alentejo plain, every year. Where they diverge, the seasonal layer is reading something the structural map cannot: this year's fuel.
This divergence is not a contradiction. It is the point. The structural map shows what is permanently true. The yearly layer shows what is true right now.
Knowing both gives landowners something no single map could: the full picture before fire season arrives.
Two regions pull the map to its extremes — in opposite directions.
What does this mean for your land?
Burned last year. The official map still shows red. Ours does not.
An area in the Douro interior burned in summer 2024. The structural map still classifies it as high risk. The 2026 layer reads it differently — because the fuel that fed those flames is gone.
Both maps are correct. They answer different questions. The structural map tells you what the landscape is. The yearly layer tells you what is actually on the ground this season.
Low on paper. Elevated in reality.
Parts of the Alentejo coast are classified as low structural risk. This year, satellite imagery shows unusual fuel buildup in places that don’t normally carry it. A wet winter and an early warm spring drove that buildup.
The 2026 layer isn’t a single number.
Look beneath the orange. The dominant input into this year’s susceptibility layer is NDVI — how much living, green biomass is on the ground right now. Bright green areas show abundant fuel; tan areas show sparse cover. This is what makes 2026 different from the long-term structural baseline.
Three elements. One is yours.
Terrain stays. Weather changes. Fuel is yours.
Terrain
Permanent. The shape of your land.
Weather
Variable. Outside any landowner’s control.
Fuel load
Manageable. Yours to act on, every year.
Where the fuel is heaviest
Slopes south of the village. Dense scrub, no clearance recorded since 2019.
Ownership gaps
A significant number of parcels in the high-susceptibility band have no contactable owner on record.
The defence line
50 m around buildings in forest territory (10 m on farmland, 100 m around built-up areas). The single most effective action a landowner can take.
One next step
Check your land before summer arrives.
A 5-minute checklist built from the same satellite layer above. Personalised to your parcel. Free for every Portuguese landowner.
Explore the maps
Find your município. Compare the maps.
ICNF's national classification and A Minha Terra's 2026 layer answer different questions. Search your município, or roam the country.
Choose a map