Wildfires in Italy 2026: Sicily burned 626 km² in one summer, and Sardinia's two official counts don't match

Two kinds of fire statistics, and why Sardinia has two numbers

Italy has no single fire count that everyone uses. The figures most often quoted come from EFFIS, the European Commission's fire information system run by the Joint Research Centre. EFFIS maps the outline of each burnt area from satellite images. Its 2025 report explains that Sentinel-2 imagery, used since 2018, "allowed the mapping of fires of about 5 ha or larger". When EFFIS compares years over a longer period, it filters out fires under 30 hectares so that older and newer data match.

ISPRA, Italy's national environmental research institute, reprocesses the EFFIS data each year by region and land cover. Its reports are the source for the regional figures in the table below. ISPRA labels its annual numbers provisional. Its 2023 report says the data await the official burnt-area figures from the Carabinieri forestry command and the regional forestry corps. In the sources checked for this article, no consolidated national figure from those bodies was found for 2025 or 2026.

The regions keep their own records. Sicily's Corpo forestale logs fires in an information system it calls Astuto. Sardinia's Corpo forestale e di vigilanza ambientale (CFVA) keeps running totals through the season, which reach the public mainly through the regional press. These counts include grass, scrub and farmland fires that start and stop in an afternoon. They are counts of events attended, measured on the ground.

The size threshold changes the totals even within EFFIS. Geopop reported on 2 September 2026 that 95,345 hectares had burned in Italy by 26 August, almost double the 2006 to 2025 average for the same date of 48,758 hectares. Its source note says that extraction counted only fires above 30 hectares. ISPRA's season report keeps all mapped fires and is the fuller figure for the summer. Both come from the same satellites. The difference lies in the filter and the dates, and any comparison of 2026 with earlier years needs both stated.

The two Sardinian figures for 2026 differ on three counts. The first is the period. The regional total of 9,478.69 hectares runs from the start of the year to 2 August, as reported by L'Unione Sarda on 4 August. The EFFIS figure of 3,990 hectares covers 15 June to 15 September. By 15 July the regional count already stood at 5,718 hectares, and that count runs from 1 January, before the satellite window opened.

The second is size. The regional count recorded 1,550 fires by 2 August, which works out at about 6.1 hectares per fire on average. That is close to the size at which EFFIS mapping begins, so a large share of Sardinia's fires are probably too small for the satellites to outline. The third is the kind of fire. The same regional figures show wooded area burned down 63% on 2025 and non-wooded area up 38%. Grass, stubble and farm fires are often small and quickly put out, so a season dominated by them can produce a large ground count and a smaller mapped area. Neither the Region nor ISPRA has published a reconciliation of the two series, so the size of each effect cannot be measured from the public data.

How 2025 and 2026 compare, and why Sicily carried the 2026 season

The 2025 season was severe by the satellite measure. The JRC's advance report on 2025 puts Italy's burnt area at 96,539 hectares across 1,910 mapped fires and says this was "almost double the average". It records 85% of the damage in summer, one fire of over 5,500 hectares in the Trapani district and 23 other fires above 500 hectares, against 6 such fires mapped in 2024. ISPRA's analysis of the same data says only 2007, 2017, 2021 and 2023 had more burnt area in a series that starts in 2006. ISPRA puts about 39% of the 2025 area on farmland and more than 30% inside protected areas.

Sicily dominated 2025 as well. ISPRA's figure of 506.68 km² for the island, quoted by Geopop, is about 52% of the national area. A count by the environmental group Legambiente, presented at the Forum Foreste in October 2025 and reported by Quotidiano di Sicilia, gave 49,064 hectares for Sicily out of 94,070 for Italy between 1 January and 15 October. That works out at 52.2%, though the newspaper rounded it to 53%. The gap between Legambiente's national total and the EFFIS full-year figure is 2,469 hectares, or 2.6%, and the shorter period is the likely reason, though Legambiente's method was not checked. The two numbers are compatible once their dates are stated.

The 2026 season was worse. ISPRA's season report gives 1,126.55 km² burned between 15 June and 15 September, with 169.81 km² of it forest, about 15%. ISPRA describes this as an increase of more than 40% on the previous season over the same weeks. In its 2018 to 2025 comparison, only 2021 and 2023 were higher. The three summer months of 2026 alone exceed the 965.39 km² that ISPRA recorded for the whole of 2025. That is a comparison across different periods, and the full-year 2026 figure will be higher still when it is published in 2027.

Sicily's 626.04 km² is 56% of the season's national total. Most of it was open land. Only 59.11 km² of the Sicilian area was forest, about 9%. The pattern is similar to the ground count from 2025, when Sicily's Corpo forestale recorded 3,757 fires between 15 May and the end of July, burning 4,977 hectares of wooded land and 26,423 hectares of non-wooded land. About 84% of that area was outside woodland. Fires on pasture, stubble and scrub are the bulk of the Sicilian problem by area.

The share swings widely from year to year. On the EFFIS series, Sicily held 69% of Italy's burnt area in 2023 and 34% in 2024, when the national total fell to 51,424 hectares. Sardinia's share moved the other way in those two years, from about 2% to about 11%. A handful of large fires can move a region's total by tens of thousands of hectares, so one season says little about the next. The four years in the table support a narrower statement. In three of them, Sicily burned at least half of Italy's mapped area, though the 2025 share is press-reported and 2026 covers part of a season.

The dates of the worst days are in the regional record. On 22 July 2026 the Sicilian civil protection department issued a red fire alert for every province, according to Il Post. About 100 residents and about 20 patients of a clinic were evacuated at Santo Stefano Quisquina in the province of Agrigento. A stretch of the motorway towards Catania near the Irosa junction was closed for hours. A 59-year-old firefighter died at San Cataldo after collapsing at a fire. Five weeks later, the Region's forestry command counted 198 fires in Sicily over the weekend of 29 and 30 August, with 20 aerial interventions authorised by the national air operations centre.

Sardinia's 2026 story is quieter on the satellite measure. Its 39.90 km² is 3.5% of the national season total. Its forest share was 5.54 km². In 2024, by contrast, EFFIS mapped 5,524 hectares on the island, about 11% of Italy's total that year. On the ground count, 2026 was close to 2025 in area and slightly busier in number of fires. Gianluca Cocco, commander of the regional forestry corps, said that of the fires investigated over the past five years, 60% were set deliberately and 40% through negligence, with six lightning fires in 2026, as reported by L'Unione Sarda on 4 August.

Heat is part of the background. The summer of 2026 also brought Italy's most widespread heatwave alerts since the Ministry of Health's online archive began. The fire reports cited here do not attribute any share of the burnt area to temperature, and no such attribution is offered in this article.

Zingaro and Punta Molentis: what was recorded, and what was not

Two fires on the same July weekend in 2025 reached places that visitors know by name. The first was in the Riserva naturale dello Zingaro, the protected coast between Scopello and San Vito lo Capo in western Sicily. A Regione Siciliana notice dates the fire to 25 and 26 July 2025. It closed both the Zingaro and Monte Cofano reserves to the public so that damage, hazards and the cause could be assessed. The notice gives no area. The Region's later press release says about 1,600 hectares of protected area burned. GreenMe reported the evacuation of about 50 homes at Mazzo di Sciacca, near Scopello.

Zingaro reopened in stages. The Region announced on 11 March 2026 that the reserve would reopen on Saturday 14 March through the south entrance only, with about 3.9 kilometres of the coastal path open and a loop of about 10 kilometres using the mid-slope trail. The north end, near San Vito lo Capo, stayed closed for works commissioned by the Comune. Balarm reported on 8 May that the north entrance would reopen on Saturday 9 May, with the full coastal and mid-slope paths usable again. Counted from the closure notice to the partial reopening, the reserve was shut for 227 days.

The second fire reached Punta Molentis, a beach in Villasimius on Sardinia's south-east coast, on the afternoon of Sunday 27 July 2025. Quotidiano.net reported that about 200 people were taken off the beach by sea. The Cagliari Coast Guard took 102 by patrol boat and the Guardia di Finanza took 39. Private boat owners took the rest, without a published number. Several cars in the car park beside the beach burned. No hectare figure was published. The figure of 102 evacuees that circulated online is the Coast Guard's share alone. In 2026 the beach reopened under a capped-access order, covered in our analysis of Italy's capped beaches, where Avvenire quotes the mayor saying the beach has halved and links that to the 2025 fire and the storms that followed.

The 2026 season produced no comparable visitor evacuation in the sources checked. ANSA reported on 31 August 2026 that a fire burned between La Cinta beach and the town of San Teodoro in north-east Sardinia, reaching cars parked near the beach. Civil protection evacuated one farm as a precaution. The report mentions no evacuation of people on the beach. Searches for 2026 evacuations at airports, ferry ports or resorts around Palermo, Catania, Cagliari, Olbia, Alghero, Cefalù, the Costa Smeralda and San Vito lo Capo found none. That is an absence in the sources searched, and it is no proof that none happened.

The rules visitors are under

Both regions publish the dates of their fire season by decree. In Sicily, a decree of the regional environment department signed on 12 March 2026 set the 2026 fire campaign to run from 15 May to 31 October. In Sardinia, regional government resolution 28/56 of 4 June 2026 approved the fire plan for 2026 to 2028. It declared a period of high fire danger from 1 June to 31 October, which the head of regional civil protection can change, including for specific areas. It also brought the daily fire-danger bulletin forward to 1 May. The resolution says the only article changed from 2025 is article 24, which deals with tourist accommodation, car parks and rest areas.

For anyone who rents a villa, camps or drives rural roads in summer, the Sardinian page is the clearest official statement found. The detailed prohibitions sit in part nine of the Sardinian plan, which the resolution says is enforced by the forestry corps. That annex was not opened for this article, so specific bans on barbecues, beach access or park entry on high-danger days are not stated here.

National law adds limits that last long after a fire. Law 353 of 21 November 2000, the framework law on forest fires, says burned woodland and pasture cannot change use for at least 15 years. Its original text bans new buildings on burned woodland and pasture for 10 years, except where authorised before the fire, bans publicly funded replanting for five years unless authorised, and bans grazing and hunting on burned woodland for 10 years. Each comune must keep a register of burned land, starting with the previous five years, and update it every year. Property deeds signed within 15 years of a fire must cite these limits or are void. Later amendments to the law were not checked for this article.

The register matters to anyone buying or developing rural land. Because the limits attach to the land for 10 to 15 years, the comune's register is the place to check whether a plot near a resort or a coastal road burned recently. Sardinia's change to article 24 of its fire rules for 2026, covering tourist accommodation, car parks and rest areas, is the one revision the Region flagged for this year. The text of that article was not reviewed here, so its obligations are not summarised.

For travelers, the practical effect of these rules is indirect. They do not close beaches or trails by themselves. Closures such as Zingaro's come from the body that manages the site, and they are announced site by site. Our Sardinia travel guide and Sicily travel guide cover the coasts and reserves involved.

What no one measures: the effect on visitors

The burnt-area record is detailed. The tourism record is empty. No public body has published, for 2025 or 2026, how many visitors were evacuated in Sicily or Sardinia, how many bookings were cancelled because of fire, how many nights were lost, or how many visitors a closed reserve turned away. No figure was found for the number of people who used the Zingaro paths before the 2025 fire, so its 227-day closure cannot be expressed in visitors.

The only cancellation figure found that names the wildfires comes from a different year and a mix of causes. On 27 July 2023, Vicio Sole, president of Assoturismo Confesercenti Sicilia, told BlogSicilia that cancellations had reached 40% "in queste ore", estimated €10 million in refunds to tourists and expected a 30% fall in the following months. He named the closure of Catania airport, the heatwave and the fires together. This was a trade-association estimate made during the emergency. No later measurement of that summer's effect was found.

Even the emergency response is recorded more fully than its effect on visitors. The Region of Sicily reports how many fires its crews attended over a weekend and how many aircraft sorties were authorised. Sardinia's figures appear every few weeks in the regional press. Rescue counts appear when the Coast Guard or the Guardia di Finanza takes people off a beach. None of these reports says whether the people affected were residents or visitors. A count of tourists moved out of hotels, campsites or beaches during a fire would be the simplest measure of exposure, and none was found.

Regional tourism totals cannot fill the gap. The official counts behind Sicily's 2025 tourism statistics and Sardinia's 2025 nights are annual or monthly totals for whole regions. A fire that empties one beach for an afternoon or closes one reserve for seven months does not show up in them in any way that can be separated from weather, prices, flights or the calendar. The same pattern appeared after Etna closed Catania airport in 2026, when no public body published closure hours or a tourism loss. The authorities publish hazards, rules and response figures. The effect on visitors is left unmeasured.

Two other gaps limit what can be said. First, no consolidated national 2025 figure from the Carabinieri forestry command was found, and ISPRA still describes its EFFIS-based numbers as provisional. Second, cause statistics come mostly through the press. A Geopop article of 2 September 2026 attributes to the Carabinieri forestry command a figure of about 98% for deliberate and negligent fires combined, while its opening line says 98% are deliberate. The article itself says the official split for 2026 will be consolidated only at the end of the year. The underlying document was not found. The Sardinian 60/40 split is a commander's statement about investigated fires, reported by a newspaper.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Sicily and Sardinia publish their fire-season dates, and both run to 31 October in 2026, so the risk period covers most of the beach season. In Sardinia, call 1515 to report a fire, or 112 for any emergency, and move away from the fire. Before a hike or a beach day in a reserve, check the managing body's page for closures, because they are announced site by site. Zingaro reopened in full only on 9 May 2026, more than nine months after the July 2025 fire. Use official sources for safety guidance, and treat this article as background.

Tourism businesses and investors. The fire risk is concentrated. In the 2026 season, 56% of the burnt area mapped in Italy was in Sicily, most of it outside woodland. Sardinia's 2026 regional figures show more fires than in 2025 on similar area, with the wooded share falling. Sardinia changed only one article of its fire rules for 2026, article 24 on tourist accommodation, car parks and rest areas, so operators there should read it. Under its original text, Law 353/2000 bars new building on burned woodland for 10 years; later amendments were not checked. No measured figure exists for what fires cost tourism businesses in either region, so any loss figure offered in a pitch or a report should be treated as an estimate.

Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite, with source and date: Italy 2025, 96,539 hectares in 1,910 mapped fires (JRC/EFFIS Advance Report 2025); Italy 15 June to 15 September 2026, 1,126.55 km², Sicily 626.04 km², Sardinia 39.90 km² (ISPRA, Rapporto CSA 02-2026, EFFIS data to 22 September); Sardinia 1 January to 2 August 2026, 9,478.69 hectares and 1,550 fires (regional figures reported by L'Unione Sarda, 4 August 2026); Zingaro, about 1,600 hectares, reopened in part on 14 March 2026 (Regione Siciliana). Do not compare the Sardinian regional count with the EFFIS figure as if one were wrong. Do not call 95,345 hectares the 2026 total; that EFFIS extraction ran to 26 August and counted fires above 30 hectares only. Do not attribute the 5,500-hectare Trapani-district fire in the EFFIS report to Zingaro, because the report names no place. Do not repeat "102 evacuated" for Punta Molentis as the total, and do not cite "98% arson" without the source's own qualification.