On July 26, 2004, numerous fires were burning across the Iberian Peninsula, testing firefighters in Spain and Portugal, who are trying to keep the blazes from destroying parks, historic towns, and people’s homes. In this image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite, a large concentration of fires dots northern Portugal (top left), another cluster appears around Lisbon, about three-quarters of the way down the coast, and a few are visible near the southern coast as well. Over the course of the next day, one of the fires in the Algarve region in the south of Portugal had grown considerably.
Image by Jesse Allen, based on data from the MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-GSFC