Prime minister says telephone cables and communications towers were destroyed by wildfires that have killed at least 62 people

Early efforts to alert the public to the deadly wildfires that have killed at least 62 people in Portugal were hindered after the flames destroyed phone lines and communications towers, the country’s prime minister has said.

More than 1,500 firefighters are still battling to control the fires that have raged across central Portugal since the weekend, killing many people as they tried to flee in their cars and leaving dozens more injured.

António Costa said on Monday that the emergency services had acted as fast as they could after the fire broke out on Saturday but acknowledged that communications had been badly affected.



“What happened was cables and communications towers were destroyed by the fire, even their first replacements melted,” he said. “But nothing compromised the firefighting efforts.”



Portugal wildfires – in pictures Read more

Most communications have been restored, but Costa called on residents to listen to the radio and heed any official advice.

The government has declared three days of national mourning as it awaits the arrival of more water-dropping planes from Spain, France and Italy. The EU and UN have also pledged to provide any necessary assistance.

As the fires continued to burn, some extraordinary tales of resourcefulness and heroism began to emerge.

Maria do Céu Silva, a resident of the village of Nodeirinho, saved 12 people - including a 95-year-old woman - by telling them to shelter from the flames in her water tank As the fire and its “impossible” heat approached, Silva tried to get her family to safety but her 85-year-old mother was too frail.

“My husband told me to put my mother in the van, but since she couldn’t get in, she just said, ‘Let me die here’,” Silva told Correio da Manhã newspaper. “My son and I managed to pick her up and get her [into the tank].” Other residents followed suit and the group spent six hours in the tank.

“If it hadn’t been for the tank, we’d all have died,” she said. “It was horrible, it looked like a horror movie.”

Not all of the village residents were so lucky and Silva said she had lost many friends and neighbours in the fire.

“They were all my friends, my good friends,” she said. “A young man who was 21 still hasn’t turned up … so many people were burned.”



On Monday the French foreign ministry announced that a French national had died in the fire but gave few details out of respect for the victim’s family.

The fire, which broke out in the municipality of Pedrógão Grande and is thought to have been caused by a lightning strike, spread quickly in several directions.

More than 60 people were injured, with 18 taken to hospitals in Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. Five of them, four firefighters and a child, are in a critical condition.

Emergency services have been criticised for not closing the road where 47 of the deaths occurred, while some local residents said they had been left without firefighters for hours as their homes burned.

Many blamed poor forestry reserve planning and the depopulation of remote villages that has left many wooded areas untended.

Portugal’s leading environmental lobby group, Quercus, said the fires were the result of “forest management errors and bad political decisions” by governments over recent decades.

Three months ago the government announced new measures to combat the annual scourge of wildfires. They include restrictions on eucalyptus plantations and a simplified and cheaper programme of property registration that seeks to ascertain which land is being neglected.

Not all of the reforms have come into legal force yet.

Costa said the death toll was likely to rise as the emergency services conducted village-to-village searches. “The fire has reached a level of human tragedy that we have never seen before,” he said.

The authorities said very low smoke clouds prevented helicopters and fire planes dropping water on the flames efficiently for most of Sunday.

The wooded hills of Pedrógão Grande, 90 miles (150km) north of Lisbon, were gutted by the fires.



Above the blackened trees and charred soil, a thick layer of white smoke hovered over either side of a motorway for about 12 miles. A burnt-out car sat outside partly destroyed and abandoned houses, while a few metres away police in face masks surrounded the body of a man hidden under a white sheet.

The local police chief, Almeida Rodrigues, ruled out arson, saying a tree had been struck by lightning during one of the dry thunderstorms that have punctuated the current heatwave.

The Iberian peninsula is experiencing unusually hot weather, with temperatures rising above 40C (104F) in some regions.

“Everything burned very quickly given the strong winds,” said local resident Isabel Ferreira, 62, who saw the flames pass within two miles of her house. “I knew several of the victims. One of my colleagues lost her mother and her four-year-old girl as she could not get them out of the back of the car.”

A British man living nearby also had a narrow escape. Like more than half of the dead in Saturday’s blaze, Daniel Starling had jumped in his car and raced away as the flames bore down. He came across a family of four elderly people and picked them up. He said he drove around fallen trees and even off the road in his quest to reach safety.

“We stopped at one point, because we did not know where to go, because there were flames everywhere. But I just carried on the only way that I knew. (It was) just flames over the car and the family and me screaming,” said the 56-year-old from Norwich, England.

They stopped when they came to a policeman at a junction. “The family,” Starling said, “got out and they were kissing the car.”

Jorge Gomes, Portugal’s secretary of state for internal administration, said 18 of those burned to death had been trapped in cars engulfed by flames on the road between Figueiró dos Vinhos and Castanheira de Pêra. “It is difficult to say if they were fleeing the flames or were taken by surprise,” he said.

Other bodies were found in houses in isolated areas. At least three villages near Pedrógão Grande were evacuated.

Luisilda Malheiro and her husband, Eduardo Abreu, who are both farmers and 62, escaped the inferno on route N-236. “We escaped in time, me on the tractor and he with our van,” Malheiro said. “Our house is still there but we lost everything else: the chickens, the rabbits and the ducks. We were only able to save two goats.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman sits on a street in Pedrógão Grande as forest fires continue to burn. Photograph: Paulo Cunha/EPA

Valdemar Alves, the local mayor, said he was stunned by the number of deaths. “This is a region that has had fires because of its forests, but we cannot remember a tragedy of these proportions,” he said. “It does not seem real, it is out of this world ... It is a real inferno, we have never seen anything like that.”

In the village of Nodeirinho, where 11 residents died, state television RTP showed burnt-out cars and blackened houses. Shocked residents said a whole family that was trying to flee their home in a car had been caught in “a tornado of flames”.

Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo, went to the Leiria region to meet victims’ families, saying he was “sharing their pain in the name of all the Portuguese people”.

Portugal was hit by a series of fires last year that devastated more than 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of the mainland.



Fires on the island of Madeira in August killed three people, while about 40 homes were destroyed and 5,400 hectares of land burned during 2016. In 1966, a blaze in the forest of Sintra, west of Lisbon, killed 25 soldiers trying to battle the flames.