A major wildfire broke out on Sunday afternoon near Benahavis, a Costa del Sol village popular with wealthy British holidaymakers and expats, prompting a large-scale emergency response involving more than 100 firefighters, 11 helicopters and 11 aircraft. The blaze, which started near a small Catholic chapel about a mile from the village centre, forced authorities to declare Emergency Level One and evacuate a nearby luxury residential estate, underscoring the growing wildfire risk facing this affluent stretch of southern Spain.

Officials sent an ES-Alert warning to residents' phones telling them to shelter indoors and close doors and windows, while gusts of up to 50km/h hampered firefighting efforts. One person was burnt while trying to extinguish the fire and a firefighter was injured in a fall, and around 125 villas in the gated Montemayor Alto estate were evacuated as a precaution. The incident follows a 2022 wildfire in the same area that displaced 2,000 people, and comes two months after a deadly blaze in Almeria killed 15 people, including nine Britons.