Chile Declares State of Catastrophe as Wildfires Devastate Biobío and Ñuble

LIRQUÉN, Chile — On a seaside hill above this small port town, rows of homes have been reduced to foundations and twisted corrugated metal. Fishing nets lie tangled in ash. The air still smells of smoke and wet earth as residents pick through what is left of their living rooms.

“I ran out with what I had on,” said a woman in her 50s, standing where her wooden house once stood. “The phone screamed with the alert, we saw the fire coming down, and we just ran. By the time we came back, everything was gone.”

Lirquén, a sector of the coastal commune of Penco north of Concepción, has become the most visible symbol of the wildfires that have swept through central–southern Chile since mid-January, in what authorities describe as one of the country’s most serious fire emergencies in years. Officials estimate about 80% of the locality has been affected and roughly 90% of its surface burned.

Since the first flames flared on Jan. 16, the fires have killed at least 21 people, injured more than 300 and forced over 50,000 residents to evacuate in the Biobío and Ñuble regions. Government and United Nations tallies indicate that more than 45,000 hectares (about 111,000 acres) of forest, scrubland and rural communities have burned. Between 800 and more than 2,300 homes have been destroyed, depending on the count, with thousands of people now classified as damnificados — directly affected.

Authorities say almost all of the individual blazes trace back to human activity — negligence or arson — but their rapid spread and intensity reflect a broader pattern: record heat, a 13-year “megadrought” in central Chile, and highly flammable pine and eucalyptus plantations that meet towns at the urban fringe.

“We are facing an extreme event, a mega-fire,” Interior Minister Álvaro Elizalde said at a national briefing, comparing the current emergency to severe fire seasons in 2017, 2023 and 2024. “We have lost lives, thousands of hectares and many homes. Our priority is protecting people and supporting those who have lost everything.”

State of catastrophe and a rising toll

The first major ignition points were recorded the afternoon and evening of Jan. 16 in Biobío, including in Lirquén, Penco, Tomé and Talcahuano, as well as in rural communes of neighboring Ñuble such as Quillón and Ránquil. Fueled by dry vegetation and winds that reached 40 to 60 kilometers per hour, separate fires quickly pushed into peri-urban hillsides around Concepción and along the coast.

With flames approaching homes overnight, Chile’s disaster agency, SENAPRED, sent dozens of mobile alerts through the country’s emergency cell broadcast system, ordering evacuations across a patchwork of communities. By the night of Jan. 18, more than 50,000 people had been instructed to leave their homes at least once.

In the early hours of Jan. 18, President Gabriel Boric announced a constitutional state of catastrophe for Biobío and Ñuble, allowing the government to deploy the armed forces in support of emergency operations and impose movement restrictions if needed.

“Given the serious ongoing fires, I have decided to declare a state of catastrophe in the Ñuble and Biobío regions,” Boric wrote on the social media platform X. “All resources are available.”

The decree placed affected areas under the command of regional military chiefs, who can coordinate evacuations, secure access roads, requisition equipment and, in some communes, establish nighttime curfews to deter looting and prevent people from reentering dangerous zones.

As firefighters and forestry brigades battled the flames, the human toll mounted. By Jan. 18, Public Security Minister Luis Cordero reported 19 deaths, most of them in Biobío. Within days, the official count reached 21 fatalities and more than 300 injured, including people treated for burns, smoke inhalation and trauma suffered during evacuations.

An Interior Ministry balance released on Jan. 22 put the number of directly affected people above 20,000, with at least 817 homes listed as destroyed and more than a dozen official shelters operating. A subsequent situation report by the U.N. team in Chile, based on updated government data, referenced about 2,359 homes destroyed or severely damaged and roughly 700 people still living in shelters.

The fires also spread southward into parts of La Araucanía region, burning thousands of hectares near towns such as Angol, Lumaco and Nueva Imperial.

Lirquén and the fire line between forest and town

In Biobío, the worst damage has clustered along the interface where plantations and native forest meet working-class neighborhoods and rural villages.

Lirquén, built along a bay dominated by a port and small fishing operations, is ringed by steep, forested slopes that rise quickly from the sea. Many homes that burned were wooden structures on those hillsides, where low-income families have settled in recent decades.

“What you see in Lirquén is the extreme expression of the urban–rural interface,” said a regional disaster specialist in Concepción. “You have pine and eucalyptus right up against the first line of houses, with narrow streets and limited access for emergency vehicles. Under 39-degree heat, with wind and drought, that is an explosive mix.”

Residents in other communes tell similar stories. In Penco and Tomé, whole blocks of modest homes are now rubble. In Florida and Quillón, small farmers lost houses, barns, orchards and livestock in a matter of hours. Local officials have reported damage to schools and primary health centers, raising concerns about prolonged disruptions to services just weeks before the start of the school year.

The environmental impact is still being assessed. Along with commercial plantations, patches of native forest and scrub have burned, increasing the risk of landslides and flooding on bare slopes once the rainy season returns. Farmers have reported losing cattle, sheep and poultry, and animal welfare groups have deployed veterinarians to care for burned and dehydrated pets and working animals.

Climate, drought and flammable plantations

Meteorologists had warned that conditions in mid-January would be especially dangerous. A heat wave pushed temperatures in Biobío and Ñuble above 38 and 39 degrees Celsius, with very low humidity and strong winds. Those conditions landed on a landscape already stressed by a prolonged deficit of rainfall.

Central Chile has been in what scientists describe as a megadrought since around 2010, with significantly below-average precipitation for more than a decade. International climate assessments have linked the severity and persistence of the drought to climate change, noting that warmer temperatures in the region dry soils faster and increase evaporation from reservoirs.

At the same time, Biobío and Ñuble are heavily planted with fast-growing pine and eucalyptus, key to a forestry and pulp industry that is one of Chile’s major exporters. Fire ecologists and civil society groups have long warned that such monoculture plantations can burn hotter and spread flames more quickly than more diverse native vegetation, especially where they are not broken up by firebreaks or buffer zones around communities.

Experts say those structural factors help explain why fires that likely began with individual acts — a burning pile of trash, a poorly maintained stove, an intentional ignition — could grow into such large, destructive fronts in just a few days.

Authorities have repeated that roughly 99% of forest fires in Chile are caused by human activity. Police and prosecutors have opened dozens of investigations into alleged arson or negligence this month, and officials say around 70 people have been detained on suspicion of causing or aggravating fires.

In one high-profile case, a 39-year-old man has been ordered held in pretrial detention in connection with the Trinitarias fire in Biobío, which later merged with other blazes. Prosecutors allege that the fire started from a faulty wood-burning stove. The Trinitarias complex has been associated with a large share of the area burned and the homes lost, particularly in communities near Concepción.

Firefighters on the front lines

On the fire lines, thousands of volunteer firefighters from Chile’s Bomberos corps, along with brigades from the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF), have been deployed across rugged terrain in Biobío, Ñuble and La Araucanía. Working with support from the armed forces and foreign contingents from countries including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, they have used a mix of ground crews, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to try to contain active fronts and protect homes.

The work has been dangerous. Crews have reported sudden shifts in wind, fast-moving crown fires, and in some areas, interference from unauthorized drones flying over fire lines. In La Araucanía, a fire engine was reportedly attacked while responding, underscoring the public security challenges that can complicate disaster response in some parts of southern Chile.

“We are exhausted, but we will stay as long as the fires are active,” one volunteer firefighter from Concepción told local television. “There are people behind each of these houses. That is what keeps us here.”

A decade of megafires — and unanswered questions

In terms of burned area, the 2026 fires are smaller than the vast “megafires” of 2017, when about 570,000 hectares burned, and 2023, when roughly 430,000 hectares were affected, largely in Biobío, Ñuble and La Araucanía. They also have a much lower death toll than the catastrophic urban-interface fires that hit the coastal region of Valparaíso in February 2024, which killed 138 people and destroyed more than 14,000 buildings.

But the current disaster is part of the same pattern: frequent, intense wildfire seasons driven by hotter, drier conditions and extensive flammable landscapes, and increasingly affecting populated areas.

The fires come as Chile is in a political transition. Boric, who took office in 2022, has acknowledged that climate change and land-use patterns are amplifying fire risk and has spoken in favor of reforms to forestry regulation and emergency management. He has also stressed that the state must respond to criminal actions, saying earlier in the season that “there are people who are lighting fires, and that is a crime that will be pursued.”

President-elect José Antonio Kast, a conservative former congressman, is preparing to take office later this year. He and his team have joined coordination meetings on reconstruction in the affected regions. Kast has put strong emphasis on crime and public order, and his allies have called for tougher penalties for arson and deliberate burning.

As the smoke begins to clear in Biobío and Ñuble, both administrations will face pressure from residents and experts to move beyond emergency response and address the underlying risks: where and how houses are built, how plantations are managed near towns, how much to invest in professional wildfire capacity, and how to adapt to a climate that appears to be making such events more likely.

In Lirquén, those debates feel distant as families sift through ashes for anything salvageable — a pot, a set of keys, a scorched photograph.

“I don’t know if we will rebuild here,” the woman on the hillside said, looking down toward the bay, where boats rocked in a gray haze. “The sea is the same, but the hill is different now. We have lived with smoke every summer. This time, the fire won.”