Belgium's largest wildfire forces evacuations across border as EU mobilizes resources

The fire started on Friday and moved with a speed that caught even seasoned officials off guard. By Sunday night, it had consumed 2,700 hectares of the High Fens nature reserve, a sprawl of peatlands and pine forest that straddles Belgium's eastern border with Germany. The flames crept to within 300 meters of the international line, close enough that German authorities ordered residents out of homes in the nearby town of Monschau as a precaution. It was Belgium's largest wildfire on record, and it was still spreading.

In the Belgian towns of Waimes, Sourbrodt, and Buetgenbach, around 600 people packed what they could and left. The smoke had become so thick that visibility dropped to almost nothing. David Rodolfs, who runs a restaurant in Waimes, described the scene to news agencies with the kind of stark simplicity that comes from witnessing something overwhelming: you couldn't see anything anymore. Smoke was everywhere. Authorities opened a gymnasium in a neighboring municipality to shelter those who had fled. Tourists were told to leave the area entirely.

The terrain itself worked against the firefighters. The High Fens is difficult country—peatlands and dense forest don't lend themselves to ground-based operations. Crews had to rely almost entirely on helicopters and water-bombing aircraft, and in some places, they simply had to let the fire burn through areas too hard to reach. Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin told the press he was shocked by how fast the blaze had moved and how much damage it had done. Nicolas Yernaux, a spokesperson for the regional authorities in Wallonia, acknowledged the bind they were in: there was a real risk the fire could reach homes, but they were throwing every resource they had at the problem.

By Saturday, the European Union had activated its civil protection mechanism. Three helicopters and two water-bombing aircraft arrived from the Czech Republic, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg crossed the border to help. Local farmers pitched in too, wetting down areas around homes and infrastructure. The response was multinational and urgent, the kind of mobilization that happens when a single country's resources aren't enough.

Monschau, the German town closest to the flames, sits just two kilometers from the border. It's a place of 12,000 people, famous for its Old Town with its half-timbered houses—the kind of picturesque medieval streetscape that draws tourists from across Europe. On Sunday night, authorities evacuated 30 residents from 17 homes as a precaution. The town had already been on edge: another major wildfire in the Eifel region, just 23 kilometers away, had forced 2,000 people from their homes on Friday.

By early Monday, the situation had begun to stabilize. Light rain fell, winds dropped, and humidity rose. The fire was no longer advancing toward the German border. But the larger context remained unsettling. Belgium had been gripped by extreme heat, with temperatures reaching 37 degrees Celsius in parts of the country. Scientists have documented that human-caused climate change is making the conditions that fuel wildfires—heat, dryness, low humidity—more frequent and more intense. The blazes spread faster now and burn longer. European Commissioner Hadja Lahbib framed it plainly: this was the latest evidence of the climate upheaval reshaping the continent. The wildfire season, she noted, had never started this early in the year before, and it had never reached this far north.