The death toll from the wildfire that swept through Los Gallardos and Bédar in Spain’s Almería province has risen to 15, making it what Spanish broadcasters now describe as the deadliest wildfire in Andalusia’s recorded history. Fourteen of the dead were foreign nationals. Nine were British.

The most recent victim, British national Michelle Leake, died in the early hours of Tuesday, September 8, two months after she was burned trying to help a 93-year-old woman she cared for escape the flames. Leake, a carer who had lived in Spain for more than 20 years, suffered burns to about 40 percent of her body and died in the burns unit at Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío in Seville. The woman she was trying to save had died in hospital on July 12.

A second victim, a woman with burns to 70 percent of her body, died at the same Seville unit on July 28. Spanish authorities have not released her name or nationality.

The fire broke out on Thursday, July 9, 2026, near Los Gallardos and swept toward Bédar, a village of fewer than 1,000 people. Of the 15 dead, 10 were women and five were men, all adults. Besides the Britons, three were Belgian, one French and one American; one was a Spanish citizen. Nearly 1,500 people were evacuated across Almería province, home to many foreign residents near the Mediterranean coast.

A Home Found on Television

Among the dead was Annette Kilgore, 69, who had found her retirement home on the Channel 4 program “A Place in the Sun.” She and her husband, Malcolm Timbrell, 70, moved to Bédar from Cornwall after appearing on the show in 2023, guided through the purchase by the program’s presenter, Leah Charles-King. Kilgore, who had spent years working in mental health, spoke at the start of their episode about easing into Spanish life. The couple had been together for 17 years. She vanished after evacuating their home as the fire bore down on the village, and authorities later formally identified her among the dead.

Timbrell survived. He told the BBC that he lost track of his wife and seven friends and neighbors as the flames reached their street. The group had agreed to leave by car, but he turned around to fetch Charlie and Lilly, the pair of cats he and Kilgore kept. By the time he set off after the others, they had left their vehicles behind and were attempting to flee on foot. He said he shouted at them not to walk into the fire, which he had since been told was advancing at more than 20 kilometers an hour, but that they believed it was their only way out. “They had no chance,” Timbrell told the BBC.

He sheltered inside a car with one of the cats as the fire closed in. Four of the six vehicles the group had been driving burst into flames at once, he said, and he retreated to the next as each ignited; the final two were scorched and blistered but held. “We have had an amazing life together and now it’s stopped,” he told the broadcaster.

News of the deaths in Bédar prompted a tribute from Jasmine Harman, a presenter on Channel 4, who said the loss had left her devastated and offered sympathy to everyone who had lost someone, and to Timbrell in particular.

The Road Out of Bédar

Pete and Fran Gillam, a British couple who lived in Bédar, were also killed. Their daughter, Danielle Gillam-Kirton, wrote on Facebook that police had confirmed her parents did not survive, and thanked those who had sent the family love, support and prayers.

Four bodies were recovered from a burned-out car with a right-sided steering wheel, a sign that the occupants were British. Charred vehicles lined the road leading out of the village, and authorities confirmed that some of the dead were in their cars when they tried to flee.

Emergency crews initially recovered 12 bodies burned so badly that DNA samples were required to identify them, and relatives of the missing were asked to provide samples at Bédar’s civil office. The 93-year-old British woman Leake had tried to save was taken to hospital on Friday, July 10, with burns to roughly 20 percent of her body and died at Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas in Almería on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, bringing the toll at that point to 13. She has never been publicly named.

Found Alive as Night Fell

There was one reprieve. Two British walkers, a couple caught out on the hillside, were found alive with burns to about 40 percent of their bodies by Civil Guard officers who went back over ground they had already searched, reaching them in a ravine just as night fell. Sgt. Pedro Barre, one of the officers, told national broadcaster RTVE that long service teaches officers to double back on terrain they have already covered. The extraction took about three hours. Both survived.

No Mass Alert Was Sent

Spain’s Es-Alert system, which pushes emergency messages to every mobile phone in a defined area, was never activated. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether it should have been.

Antonio Sanz, the Andalusian regional government’s first vice president and its emergencies chief, defended the decision from a forward command post in Turre on July 11. Different parts of the area needed different instructions, he said: “People who had to be evacuated would have received messages telling them to shelter, and people who had to shelter would have received messages telling them to evacuate.” An Es-Alert, he said, “could have affected 7,000 residents when we wanted to move out 70.” Returning to the question on July 23, he argued that the area’s scattered homes and limited access made a blanket alert impractical, and that direct, personalized warnings by security forces were the better method. Fallen poles, he said, had knocked out communications.

What residents did get varied. Church bells were rung. The town hall sent WhatsApp messages. The mayor, councillors, volunteers and local police went door to door. But a Reuters investigation published on July 22 found the warnings reached people unevenly: five residents told the news agency they received nothing at all. Bob Layton, a retired British technical manager, said that “if I had received any advice to stay in my home we would have been dead.” Reuters also reported that Bédar’s municipal emergency plan had last been approved in 2019 and was still being updated, and that of Almería province’s 103 municipalities, only 42 had emergency plans at all and just nine met the four-year update requirement.

The first call to the emergency line came at 4:29 p.m., reporting a burning electrical cable. The regional government did not activate the first operational level of its emergency plan until 7:37 p.m. The Andalusian branch of the opposition Socialist party has pressed for records showing which mobile base stations were working and when, disputing the account that coverage had failed. The regional government has not retracted or qualified its position.

Families Go to Court

Eight families of the dead were admitted as private prosecutors in the criminal case on August 7, with the arrangement formalized on August 10. Three attended the court in person; five joined by videoconference from elsewhere in Europe. A ninth family’s application was deferred. One relative told the Spanish news agency EFE that his father had faced an “absence of warnings” before the fire reached him.

Relatives have also formed a group, Help Bédar, to fund independent expert work on fire behavior, warning systems and evacuation management. Five family members run it, among them Danielle Gillam-Kirton and Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, whose father Stanislas was among the Belgian victims. Their fundraising page, opened on August 22, states: “No ES-Alert message was sent to phones in the area. Officials have said residents were warned. Our relatives were not reached.” It also poses a comparison: “One week later, a fire near Madrid burned 27,000 hectares, with over 55,000 people evacuated or confined, and nobody died. Why was Bédar different?” As of September 24 the appeal had raised about €10,900 of a €100,000 target from 161 donors.

On September 16 the Socialist party announced it would join the case as an accusing party. Two days later, the Andalusian Parliament’s governing majority rejected opposition calls for a parliamentary inquiry, arguing that the judicial investigation was sufficient. The regional government has instead announced an interdepartmental commission on fire prevention.

Bones in a Burned-Out Car

On August 19, Gillam-Kirton went to the municipal vehicle pound in Mojácar to inspect her parents’ burned-out car, recovered from the El Curato area of Bédar. The Civil Guard had told her the vehicle had been inspected meticulously and that she would find nothing. Inside she found multiple bone fragments, including what she described as part of a human hip on the front seat, along with two mobile phones, several sets of keys, jewelry and money.

Authorities had earlier given the family a single small bone fragment, which they had cremated at a funeral weeks before. “Then who or what did we cremate?” she said.

She reported the find to local police the same day and was directed to the Civil Guard barracks at Garrucha. Officers suggested the bones were probably animal remains. She had to press repeatedly before they were sent for DNA testing, and no result has been made public. The family has since filed an eight-page complaint against the Civil Guard as an institution, rather than against individual officers, asking what analyses were carried out. On September 17 a senior officer replied in three paragraphs, offering condolences and stating that the matter had been referred to the investigating court.

Another family has reported a similar discovery. Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt found human remains and personal effects — spectacles, shoes, clothing buttons, jewelry and keys — scattered across the burned ground at El Curato where his father died. He reported it to local police, who called in the Civil Guard, and then guided officers across the terrain himself.

A Cable, and a Question About Current

The judicial investigation is being run by the civil and investigating section of the Tribunal de Instancia in Vera, post 3, under judicial secrecy. It has kept open whether the fire was accidental, negligent or deliberate. No person or company has been named as a formal suspect.

Investigators are focused on an inactive private electrical line near kilometer 511 of the N-340A, which once supplied an abandoned restaurant and nearby rural properties. Witnesses reported seeing a cable fall and throw sparks immediately before the fire started. Endesa says the line was decommissioned in 2009 and was therefore dead; Red Eléctrica says the infrastructure is not part of its network. Court-appointed experts have countered that without live current running through the copper, the sparks witnesses describe would be physically impossible. That contradiction is the central question before the court, and it has not been resolved.

A Summer of Extreme Heat

Temperatures in the area reached around 40 degrees, and parched ground and strong winds drove the flames rapidly through Los Gallardos. Juanma Moreno, president of the regional government of Andalusia, announced on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, that the fire had been stabilized and its perimeter secured, and authorities allowed more than 1,000 residents back into evacuated villages. It was not declared fully extinguished until July 24. The settled figure for the area burned is about 5,200 hectares (12,850 acres), revised down from the roughly 7,000 hectares estimated while the fire was still active.

Spain recorded its second-hottest June on record in 2026, and the heat was blamed for upward of 1,000 excess deaths. Figures from the European Forest Fire Information System put the area burned nationwide in 2025 at more than 393,000 hectares, the largest such total since 1994. By September 16 this year, Spain had lost a further 296,815 hectares — 44 percent of all land burned across the European Union in 2026.

The central government said in July that it would designate the area as seriously affected by a civil protection emergency, unlocking aid for residents and councils across Los Gallardos, Bédar, Lubrín and Antas. A separate regional aid scheme, offering residential awards of between €2,580 and €15,120, closed to applications on August 24. Spain’s insurance compensation body does not cover forest fire damage, a gap the consumer group OCU highlighted in the weeks after the blaze.

Alex Ellis, the British ambassador to Spain, travelled to Almería in the days after the fire and met affected residents. “I have seen today the terrible consequences of the wildfires which have swept through Almeria,” he said, thanking emergency services, local authorities and the embassy’s consular team.