Figueira da Foz, Portugal, May 22, 2026 (Lusa) – Portugal’s interior minister, Luis Neves, said on Friday that the country cannot live with the inevitability of rural fires and must find tools to fight them, starting with prevention and forest management.
“To fight this inevitable misfortune, we must work proactively, with anticipation, on a clean, organised forest that creates jobs, wealth, and territorial cohesion,” Luis Neves said in Figueira da Foz, on the coast.
The minister, speaking at the closing session of the debate "Incêndios Florestais: O Fogo está a mudar - E nós?" (Forest Fires: The Fire is Changing - And Us?), which the Navigator Company (a Portuguese pulp and paper company) organised, said that a scientifically managed and organised forest with a new landscape “is the best antidote to large fires.”
He said Portugal needed to follow this path, adding that “the safest territories are those with continuous prevention, active management, and early intervention capability.”
“It will take years, but we will make this paradigm shift,” he said.
Neves said there is “no room for amateurism” in Portugal and that the country must manage the forest in a “multidisciplinary way, without barriers, and as the president says, without condominiums” (meaning fragmented private boundaries).
Following the theme of the debate, the minister said the government would also change the way it deals with fires, through work “that requires anticipation, knowledge, active landscape management, technical capacity, and permanent cooperation among entities.”
He told journalists at the end of the debate that workers were clearing and cleaning forest paths and land hit by Storm Kristin in the best possible way against the clock, focusing on the 22 municipalities where the greatest damage occurred.
“We are very satisfied with the progress made so far. But no one should think that because we have had this organisation, working uninterruptedly with hundreds of people and dozens of resources and machines, that everything is resolved, because it is not,” he warned.
The minister again appealed to citizens and landowners to fulfil their obligation to clear land around houses and industrial units, and to inform the authorities if they lack the financial means.
“There is a right to private property, and we cannot enter people's land. We have more than €40 million to allocate to the Integrated Landscape Management Operations (a state-funded wildfire prevention programme) and to support private owners,” he said.
AMV/LYT // ADB.
Lusa
