Introduction
Forest fires are a natural phenomenon and important to forests' natural life cycles. In southern Europe these events have became seasonal ecological disasters. As mentioned before, the pre-conditions to forest fires include the fuel or vegetation state, the weather conditions and the topography. The effects of topography on fire spread are complex but, in general, steep slopes cause faster fire spread rates. Nevertheless, rough topographies always cause difficulties in firefighting and forest fires tend to have larger impacts in mountain regions. The Caramulo fires occurred in a mountainous region (Figure 2) and therefore in adverse terrain conditions. The next sections will address the other factors which contributed to this particular series of forest fires.