Chile wildfires rage for third day, entire towns wiped out
A woman and two children walk past the remains of a burnt house after a wildfire destroyed hundreds of properties in Punta de Parra, Chile, January 19, 2026. JOSE LUIS SAAVEDRA / REUTERS Wildfires that have killed at least 20 people in southern Chile and wiped out entire towns raged for a third day on Monday, January 19, fanned by warm temperatures and strong winds at the height of the Southern Hemisphere summer. The blazes started Saturday in the Nuble and Biobio regions – about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of the capital Santiago – and have since ripped through an area the size of the US city of Detroit. Around 1,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, officials said. President Gabriel Boric said Monday that firefighters had managed to contain some of the blazes but that others remained "very active" and that new fires had broken out in the Araucanía region bordering Biobio. Both Nuble and Biobio were declared disaster areas, allowing for the deployment of soldiers who patrolled a desolate landscape of melted cars, twisted metal and houses reduced to rubble. More than 3,500 firefighters were fighting the fires in Nuble and Biobio on Monday. Temperatures in the area hit around 25C (77F) on Monday, slightly lower than over the weekend. Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years, especially in its warmest and driest months of January and February. A 2024 study led by researchers at the Santiago-based Center for Climate and Resilience Research, found climate change had "conditioned the occurrence of extreme fire seasons in south-central Chile" by contributing to a long-term drying and warming trend. In February 2024, several fires broke out simultaneously near the city of Viña del Mar, northwest of Santiago, resulting in 138 deaths, according to the public prosecutor's office. Unprecedentedly large areas of the country were burnt during the 2016-17 and 2022-23 fire seasons. Elsewhere in southern South America, wildfires have burnt more than 15,000 hectares in recent days in Argentine Patagonia. Le Monde with AFP
