Spain Burns

Authored by Nicolás Sánchez via the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE),

Some laws extinguish fires; others ignite them. In Spain, a country that has mastered the art of legislating against reality, we have more of the second kind. Every time private property is violated and individual responsibility is replaced with state imposition, problems multiply. The State tends to cover a bad law with an even worse one, like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

For decades, the 1957 Forestry Act imposed strict limits on the private management of woodlands.

Owning a forest did not mean deciding how to use it: activities were tightly regulated, and uses were subject to administrative supervision. The law’s intended to keep the land as “forest” permanently, shutting the door to any alternative use.

The result was property emptied of content, where owners bore the burdens but enjoyed few legitimate benefits.

A large share of forest fires in Spain are deliberately set. The 1957 Act did not automatically prevent burned land from being rezoned or given other uses. Much depended on urban planning discretion and later administrative decisions. In practice, this opened the door to suspicions of intentional fires, since once burned, land could lose its forest value and gain urban or agricultural interest. Each summer, as flames spread across the hills, voices pointed to urban interests lurking behind the smoke. The most infamous case was Terra Mítica, where a fire preceded the rezoning of the land to build the theme park.

No hard proof was needed for the idea to take root in public opinion: fire could be the first step to business. The problem is that for the herd of public opinion and lawmakers alike, the solution was never to confront the root of the problem or to give landowners freedom to manage their forests without needing to burn them. Instead of removing perverse incentives and letting each owner care for and profit from his land, lawmakers chose the path they know best: another legal lock.

The 2003 Forestry Act was introduced as the great modernization of the forest regime. In reality, it did not solve the root problem, since restrictions on the free use of property were maintained and even expanded. Landowners still could not manage their plots without administrative approval. The big change was the “thirty-year rule”: if woodland burns, it cannot be rezoned or given a different use for three decades. The logic was that if there was no profit after a fire, the incentive to start one would disappear. However, this measure only shifted incentives. No one would now set a fire to have land rezoned (something that, in fact, was never clearly proven), but it opened a new possibility: sabotage. Imagine a plot of land in the process of rezoning. If a competitor wanted to block it, all it would take is setting it on fire. If the flames came before the paperwork was finished, the project would be dead for thirty years.

The distorted incentives to provoke fires are only part of the problem. The other major consequence of Spain’s forestry laws lies not in why fires start, but in why they spread with such violence: decades of legal restrictions have turned forests into vast warehouses of fuel. What makes these fires national catastrophes is not only that they are sometimes deliberate, but that once they begin—whether natural or intentional—they rage out of control through woodlands abandoned by design.

A fire does not grow from a spark alone; it needs fuel. Dry biomass, fallen branches, and flammable underbrush are the real drivers of disaster. This accumulation is no accident, but the result of a legal framework that for decades has encouraged abandonment. The 2003 Act, far from solving the issue, maintained restrictions on land management and even expanded them. It limited permitted uses (article 36) and required every action to pass through technical plans and authorizations (article 37). At the same time, it imposed on owners the duty to prevent fires and keep their land in good condition (article 48), while making it an offense to cut, uproot, or even gather firewood without authorization (article 67, sections c and j).

This is a heap of contradictions: owners are told to prevent fires, but stripped of the incentives to do so, while facing costs, paperwork, and potential fines. An asset that generates expenses but no income is an asset destined for abandonment. For centuries, such cleaning never depended on bureaucrats or subsidies but on spontaneous practices that benefited both locals and owners. Shepherds brought their herds, woodcutters collected branches, and neighbors gathered fuel for their homes. All this reduced biomass while providing legitimate use. Today, those practices are punished or buried under endless authorizations.

Even setting aside the perverse incentives the law creates to provoke fires, and leaving aside the abandonment it encourages, a greater problem remains: What happens after the forest has already burned? Once the fire has spread, the 2003 Act adds a decisive obstacle. By imposing the thirty-year rule, any burned land was locked, and all incentives to restore what was destroyed disappeared. The law made no distinction between a natural fire, an accident, or arson: all were equally condemned. What owner would invest in recovering a woodland that, by law, had to remain sterile for thirty years? Instead of encouraging regeneration, the law produced the opposite effect: leaving the forest abandoned and thus perpetuating devastation.

Paradoxically, in the name of environmental protection, those with the greatest interest in conserving the land have been expelled from it.

The result is a forest effectively belonging to no one: not to the owners, who cannot manage it; not to the traditional users, who no longer benefit from it; and not to the State, which lacks the means to care for it. This is the real problem.

So each summer the ritual repeats: helicopters flying overhead, dramatic TV footage, unstoppable flames, exhausted firefighters, and politicians posing among the ashes. The scene plays out year after year, always with the same promises of reform and new commissions of study.

Meanwhile, the underbrush keeps growing, dry and ready, waiting for the next spark. The fire won’t wait, and the law won’t stop it.