The Castellón fire: the Serra d'Espadà burning behind the Costa del Azahar

Where did the fire start, and what do investigators think caused it?

The fire began around the middle of Saturday 25 July 2026 on the hillside immediately above La Vall d'Uixó, an industrial town in the province of Castellón that sits inland behind the coastal plain, roughly halfway between Castellón city and Sagunto.

The starting point was unusually close to the town itself. Investigators from the Guardia Civil's environmental unit, the Seprona, said they had identified two separate but nearby ignition points on the slope, a finding reported on 31 July.

Two separate starts in the same place at the same time is the detail that shaped the official line. The Guardia Civil ruled out a natural cause and also ruled out the most common accidental explanation in this landscape, an agricultural burn that got away. The working hypothesis reported by El Debate on 26 July, and reinforced on 31 July, is that the fire was set deliberately. The government delegate in Valencia, Pilar Bernabé, repeated on 3 August that the Seprona's work points to an intentional origin, and no arrest had been reported by that date. The Seprona investigation was still open when the fire was declared controlled on 4 August.

Which villages were evacuated, and when did people get back?

This was one of the largest population movements a Valencian wildfire has forced. Emergency mobile alerts went out through Saturday evening and into Sunday, and by the end of the first night around sixteen thousand people had been moved out of their homes.

The villages taken out were the small hill settlements inside and around the Serra d'Espadà: La Vilavella, Artana, Eslida, Aín, Alcúdia de Veo, Tales, Artesa, Alfondeguilla, Suera, Villamalur, Torralba del Pinar, Ayódar, Fuentes de Ayódar and Chóvar, along with urbanisations at Betxí. La Vall d'Uixó, Betxí and Onda were confined rather than emptied, meaning residents were told to stay indoors. Counting confinement as well as evacuation, the Generalitat's measures touched more than fifty thousand people.

Within La Vall d'Uixó, the barrios of Toledo, Carbonaire, Sant Antoni and Sant Josep were evacuated on 26 July and allowed home on 27 July. Sant Josep is the neighbourhood at the mouth of the town's underground river caves, its main visitor attraction.

Evacuees were taken to sports halls in Onda, Nules, Segorbe and Moncofa, with the Red Cross running the shelters. Livestock was moved to Onda, Burriana, Moncofa, les Alqueries and Xilxes.

The orders were unwound gradually over the following week. Artana and Eslida were the last two villages still empty, and their residents were cleared to return on 31 July once the fire was declared stabilised. Nobody has been evacuated since.

Were Benicàssim, Peñíscola, Castellón city or Valencia affected?

This is the part that is easiest to get wrong, so it is worth being blunt. The Costa del Azahar resorts were not in the fire zone, were not evacuated, and their hotels, beaches and transport kept working throughout.

The geography explains why. The fire burned in a range of hills set back from the sea, and it moved between inland villages of a few hundred to a few thousand people. Benicàssim and Oropesa del Mar lie north of Castellón city, further from the fire than the city is. Peñíscola is further north again, in a different part of the province entirely. None of them appears in any evacuation or confinement order issued for this fire.

What did reach the coast was smoke. On 27 July, Castellón city, Vila-real and Benicàssim woke under a thin layer of smoke with ash falling, and the regional public health service issued the standard advice for a smoke episode: cut back hard exercise, stay indoors while the plume is overhead, keep windows shut, and use an FFP2 mask outside if you are sensitive. On 26 July the smell of burning was reported in Valencia city, well to the south. Smoke of that kind is a nuisance and a genuine problem for people with asthma or heart conditions. It is not an evacuation.

No disruption to flights at Valencia airport was reported in connection with this fire, and the Cercanías C-6 line between Valencia and Castellón kept running, with passengers able to see the fire from the train.

Which roads were closed by the fire?

Every closure was on the inland CV network, the small provincial roads that climb into the sierra. The coastal corridors stayed open.

Traffic near Nules was warned of heavy smoke across the carriageway on 26 July. Drivers on the coastal route between Valencia and Castellón lost visibility for a stretch. They were not turned back.

Those five have since come off the list. The DGT publishes a national board of roads closed by fire, the same board that carried the CV closures while they were in force, and on the copy generated at 06:25 on 6 August the only closure anywhere in Spain is the CC-167 at Casas de Millán in Cáceres, a different fire in a different region. No road in Castellón appears on it.

That does not make the sierra normal. Closures here are reimposed whenever crews need a road, and forest tracks are a separate matter from the numbered network: the Generalitat has put track repairs into its recovery plan for the area. Anyone driving to a village or a rural house in the hills should still check the morning they travel.

Can you still walk in the Serra d'Espadà?

The Serra d'Espadà is the second largest protected area in the Valencian Community, a cork oak and pine massif with waymarked walking routes, small rural hotels and casas rurales in villages such as Eslida, Aín and Alcúdia de Veo. A significant slice of the park burned, concentrated in the southern and eastern sectors above La Vall d'Uixó, Artana and Eslida. Artana lost more ground than any other municipality.

One date has now passed. All six natural parks in the province of Castellón were closed for the whole of Wednesday 12 August, the day of the total solar eclipse: the Serra d'Espadà, the Tinença de Benifassà, the Serra d'Irta, Penyagolosa, the Prat de Cabanes-Torreblanca and the Desert de les Palmes, along with the Camí dels Pelegrins de les Useres natural monument. The decision was taken jointly by the Valencian emergency agency and the regional environment secretariat, and the parks of Valencia province and three protected areas in Alicante were shut with them. Nobody was allowed on the forest tracks and paths inside them that day, on foot, by bicycle or by vehicle, and the interpretation centres did not open. The whole Valencian Community was at level 3 pre-emergency against extreme fire risk, which bans walking on paths and across open country on forest land and any use of fire within 500 metres of it. The reason was the crowds the eclipse was expected to pull into exactly the sort of dry country that has just burned. The Generalitat said on 13 August that the day had passed off normally, and stood down the coordination centre it had set up for it. The closure applied to 12 August alone.

No order closing the whole park outright has been published for any other day. The restrictions that matter are narrower and more practical. Crews are still working inside the perimeter, the burnt sector is where the recovery work is now concentrated, and the Valencian Community's standard summer rules already restrict off-track access to forest land during high fire risk, with fines attached. Walking into a burnt area while crews are cooling it is both an obstruction and a real hazard from falling trees.

The councils on the burnt side of the sierra have started saying the same thing in their own words. La Vilavella, opening a volunteer register for the eventual replanting on 6 August, told residents plainly that this was not the moment to go up the mountain to look at the damage, because burnt ground is fragile and feet on it make the damage worse. Any citizen initiative there has to be cleared with the council and the natural park first.

The honest position for a walking trip is that the northern and western parts of the sierra were untouched, and the southern approaches from La Vall d'Uixó, Artana and Eslida are not worth attempting this summer. Anyone booked into rural accommodation in those villages should contact the owner directly rather than rely on a booking site, because a village can be habitable again while the countryside around it is not. Artana is also on the Generalitat's list for repairs to its water supply, which is the kind of detail a booking site will not tell you.

What is the risk once the autumn rains arrive?

This is the part of a Mediterranean fire that outlasts the emergency, and it is the least visible risk to a visitor.

The Serra d'Espadà rises steeply above the coastal plain. Once the vegetation and leaf litter that held the soil is gone, rain runs off instead of soaking in. The first heavy autumn storm on a burnt slope can strip the fertile layer, cut new gullies, and carry ash, mud and stone down onto the roads, watercourses and villages below. Spain's environment ministry and the CEAM research foundation, which developed the post-fire decision protocol used in the Valencian Community, both say the urgent work in the first weeks is protecting the soil, not planting trees.

That work involves laying felled trunks along the contours and building small barriers to slow the water, ideally before the autumn rains arrive. Replanting comes much later. The standard approach is to wait a year or two and see where the cork oaks and pines regenerate on their own before deciding where planting is actually needed, with the full picture only clear after several more years.

For a traveller the practical consequence is seasonal. On the Valencian coast the heaviest rain typically falls in September and October, and it falls hard. Minor roads below burnt slopes in this part of Castellón will be more prone to closure after storms this autumn than they were before the fire, and that will be true long after the fire itself has stopped being news.