A wildfire tearing through Belgium's High Fens nature reserve in the east of the country has burned roughly 2,700 hectares, making it the largest blaze in Belgian recorded history. The fire broke out Friday and spread rapidly across peatlands and pine forests, with shifting winds and thick smoke forcing authorities to order evacuations by Saturday.
Around 600 residents in parts of Waimes, Sourbrodt and Bütgenbach were told to leave their homes. Tourists in the area were advised to depart as well. A gymnasium in a neighboring municipality was opened to provide emergency shelter for those displaced.
"You can't see a thing anymore, there's smoke everywhere," said David Rodolfs, a restaurant owner in Waimes, describing conditions on the ground to AFP.
Belgian Interior Minister Bernard Quintin told AFP he was "shocked" by the speed at which the fire spread and the scale of destruction it caused. Nicolas Yernaux, a spokesperson for the regional authorities in Wallonia, acknowledged a direct threat to residential areas. "There is a risk that the fire could reach homes, but we are deploying all available resources to protect them," Yernaux said.
Yernaux also cited terrain as a major obstacle to containing the blaze. Difficult-to-access areas of the reserve have had to be left to burn, with firefighting operations relying heavily on aircraft. Ground crews have focused their efforts on protecting accessible zones and residential outskirts.
Belgium activated the European Union's civil protection mechanism to bring in reinforcements. The EU deployed three helicopters and two water-bombing aircraft, drawn from the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands. Firefighters from Germany and Luxembourg joined the response, and local farmers assisted emergency crews by wetting down surrounding land.
The fire has advanced to within 3 kilometers of the German border, triggering warnings in the adjacent German town of Monschau in the Eifel region. Monschau lies just 2 kilometers from the border and has around 12,000 residents. Authorities there told people in three districts to seek alternative accommodation if possible and warned of health risks from smoke inhalation. The town is a major tourist draw in the Eifel, known for its half-timbered buildings in a historic Old Town.
Despite the proximity of the flames, the Monschau fire brigade said it does not expect the blaze to cross into German territory in the near term. "We are continuing to monitor the situation," said Philipp Krüger, operations manager of the Monschau fire brigade, in a statement to the DPA news agency.
Monschau sits about 23 kilometers from the site of a separate major fire that swept through Germany's Eifel region on Thursday, forcing approximately 2,000 people from their homes. The two incidents together put the wider border region under simultaneous pressure from wildfire on both sides.
Belgium recorded temperatures of 37 degrees Celsius—98.6 degrees Fahrenheit—in parts of the country this week during an extreme heat spell. Scientists have linked the increasing frequency and intensity of hot, dry conditions to human-caused climate change, which raises the probability of fire conditions like those now gripping eastern Belgium.
The High Fens—known in French as the Hautes Fagnes—is a protected highland plateau characterized by peat bogs, heath and pine forest. Peatlands burn with particular intensity and persistence because organic material accumulated over centuries can smolder deep underground, making suppression far harder than in conventional forest fires. The terrain's remoteness compounds the difficulty, limiting ground access for heavy equipment.
As of Saturday, no fatalities had been reported. Authorities continued to assess the fire's perimeter and the risk to additional settlements as wind direction remained unpredictable.
