Spain's worst wave of wildfires on record spread to the southern slopes of the Picos de Europa mountains on Monday and prompted authorities to close part of the popular Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route.

Cooler air and rising humidity may give Spain’s scorched regions a reprieve, but the scale of devastation underscores a hotter political and climatic reality.

Spain is deploying 500 more soldiers to help battle wildfires that have ravaged parched woodlands during a prolonged heat wave, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.

The key to preventing forest fires is creating a rural economy based on the use of forests. While this would generate much-needed employment in “la España vaciada” – “hollowed-out Spain”, the name given to the country’s depopulated rural areas – it also costs money. It is therefore essential to invest in forests.

Bloomberg covers new satellite estimates from the Copernicus space programme showing that Europe’s wildfires are the largest since 2006. The Associated Press reports that “dangerous heat” will arrive in California and the south-western US, raising the risk of wildfires.

Spain's worst wave of wildfires in at least two decades spread to the southern slopes of the Picos de Europa mountain range on Monday and prompted authorities to close part of the popular Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route.

Joaquín Ramírez of Technosylva, a Spanish company that specialises in prevention and response to wildfires, attributed this year’s litany of fires to “a combination of abandonment of rural areas, abandonment of managing [the land] and the stress exerted on our forest areas”.

Spain still faces "difficult hours" ahead in its fight against wildfires that have ravaged a record area of land, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez warned Tuesday, despite the onset of cooler weather.The most intense heat,