Mapping & fact-checking the wildfires burning through Europe
An interactive map tracks Europe's 2026 wildfires as fact-checkers debunk AI-faked animal rescues, recycled footage, and misleading firefighting claims.
It’s wildfire season, and blazes were sweeping through Europe with particularly serious outbreaks ongoing in France and Spain. As the fires quickly escalated to burn through hundreds of thousands of hectares, misinformation began to appear on social media.
Fake content and incorrect information can make it harder to visualise the real impact of this fire season. To counter this, we created an interactive map showing all the fires burning in Europe.
Meanwhile, members of Eurovision News Spotlight have been fact-checking the false claims, AI-generated content and old images circulating as the wildfires were taking hold.
Mapping the fires
Explore our interactive map showing ongoing fires and areas that have been burnt since the beginning of 2026. Map updates every 24 hours.
Fact-checking the fires: Unlikely animal rescues
As news about the fires began filtering out, false claims and fake images began to appear. One similar phenomenon appearing across countries was AI-generated videos and photos of firefighters rescuing wild animals from the flames.
👉 It's not the rescue of a fox and her cub, it's a video created with artificial intelligence — VerificaRTVE
Radio France’s Valentine Joubin, writing for franceinfo’s Vrai ou Faux, wrote about the proliferation of AI-generated images showing rescues of foxes, boar piglets, and fawns, some of them being cradled by firefighters.
Animal behaviour specialists pointed out that wild animals typically flee and don’t allow themselves to be handled — in fact, this type of intervention is extremely rare, and while firefighters do try to protect animal habitats, they say they already have enough difficulty saving human lives.
VerificaRTVE also debunked the fox video, which was circulating on Spanish-language social media. Just one post featuring it had more than 1.6 million views. The video shows the mother fox receiving CPR. However, in reality, resuscitation of an animal would involve an oxygen mask.
Firefighting capacity claims
Not every wildfire fact-check was about fake or AI-generated content.
👉 Does France have firefighting resources ‘superior to its neighbours’? — franceinfo
Franceinfo also tackled a claim made by a sitting MEP, Renew Europe’s Grégory Allione, who argued that France has firefighting resources superior to its neighbours and therefore contributes “three to four times more” to the EU's civil protection mechanism than the countries now sending it help.
The claim didn’t entirely hold up: while France’s contribution to the shared European civil protection mechanism is on the higher side, Italy and Spain both have more Canadair water bombers than France. Furthermore, Greece contributes more to the European mechanism. But some countries punch below their weight; for example Portugal, which is heavily affected by fires each summer, and which only has two Canadairs.
France does stand out from its neighbours in terms of human resources; the French fire service is made up of 43,448 firefighters and almost 14,000 military personnel, as well as more than 200,000 volunteer firefighters. These numbers are far higher than neighbouring European counterparts of similar populations like Spain and Italy.
Old content resurfaces
Several large fires are burning throughout Spain, one of Europe’s worst affected areas this summer. Some of the most-shared claims about the fires there turned out to be old material masquerading as breaking news footage.
👉 It's not a group of people trying to put out a fire in a field in Spain, it's Algeria — VerificaRTVE
👉 Morocco has not sent seaplanes to Spain to fight the fires in Madrid — VerificaRTVE
There was a viral audio clip of a “Spanish pilot” complaining that residents were blocking access to pool water for firefighting. RTVE traced it back to a 2023 broadcast from Chile, and it had no connection to the current fires.
A separate video showing a crowd beating a blaze with branches, shared as evidence of citizens fighting the fires themselves, was actually filmed in Algeria in recent days.
Meanwhile, footage said to show Moroccan aircraft helping extinguish the fires turned out to be a clip that has been circulating since 2022.