The death toll from the wildfire that swept through Los Gallardos and Bédar in Almería province, Spain, has risen to 15 after Michelle Leake, a British caregiver who had lived in Spain for more than 20 years, died in the early hours of Tuesday, September 8, 2026. Leake was burned two months earlier while trying to help a 93-year-old woman she cared for escape the flames.
The flames left Leake with burns to about 40 percent of her body. She later died in the burns unit at Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío in Seville.
Spanish broadcasters describe the blaze as the deadliest wildfire in Andalusia’s recorded history. Of the 15 people killed, 14 were foreign nationals and nine were British.
The woman Leake tried to save, Audrey Curry, died in the hospital on July 12. Curry’s daughter, Tracy Morgan, a Bédar resident, paid tribute to Leake on Facebook. “She is nothing short of a heroine, the car caught fire and she could’ve got out and saved herself, but no, she stayed to pull Mum from the flames and carried her in her arms,” Morgan wrote.
Sharon Freebury, Leake’s sister, described the escape attempt on a GoFundMe page. Leake tried to drive Curry out of danger, but “the road ahead had already been cut off by the advancing flames,” Freebury wrote. “As Michelle helped the lady out of the vehicle, a fireball swept towards them, leaving them with devastating injuries,” she wrote on the page. Another vehicle then picked up the pair and drove them away from the fire, and rescuers airlifted Leake to hospital in Seville.
The fire destroyed 5,200 hectares of hillside land and was Spain’s deadliest since 1984, when 20 people died in a blaze on the Canary island of La Gomera.
The Fire and Its Victims
Flames ignited near Los Gallardos on Thursday, July 9, 2026, then ran toward Bédar, a village of fewer than 1,000 people. Temperatures in the area climbed to around 40C degrees, while dried-out ground and strong winds pushed the fire quickly through Los Gallardos. Authorities evacuated nearly 1,500 people across Almería province, which is home to many foreign residents near the Mediterranean coast.
Of the 15 dead, 10 were women and five were men, all of them adults. Besides the Britons, three were Belgian, one French and one American, and one was a Spanish citizen.
Curry, the 93-year-old British woman, was taken to the hospital Friday, July 10, with burns to roughly 20 percent of her body. Staff at Hospital Universitario Torrecárdenas in Almería could not save her, and her death on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, brought the toll at that point to 13.
Burns covering 70 percent of her body killed a second victim, a woman who died at the same Seville unit on July 28. Spanish authorities have not released her name or her nationality.
Among the dead is Annette Kilgore, 69, who found her retirement home on the Channel 4 program “A Place in the Sun.” Her husband, Malcolm Timbrell, 70, moved with her to Bédar from Cornwall after appearing on the show in 2023, and presenter Leah Charles-King guided them through the purchase. Kilgore had spent years working in mental health. At the start of their episode she spoke about easing into Spanish life, and the couple had been together for 17 years by then.
The couple evacuated as the fire bore down on the village, and Kilgore vanished; authorities later formally identified her among the dead. Her husband lived through it. Timbrell told the BBC he lost track of his wife and of seven friends and neighbors as the flames reached their street.
Everyone in the group had agreed to leave by car. Timbrell turned around to fetch Charlie and Lilly, the pair of cats he and Kilgore kept; the others had abandoned their vehicles and were attempting to flee on foot by the time he set off after them. Timbrell said he shouted at them not to walk into the fire — which he had since been told was advancing at more than 20 kilometers an hour — but they believed it was their only way out. “They had no chance,” he told the BBC.
Timbrell sheltered inside a car with one of the cats as the fire closed in. He said four of the six vehicles the group had been driving burst into flames at once, and that the final two were scorched and blistered but held. “We have had an amazing life together and now it’s stopped,” he told the broadcaster.
Jasmine Harman, a presenter on Channel 4, paid tribute after news of the Bédar deaths. She said the loss left her devastated, and she offered sympathy to everyone who had lost someone and to Timbrell in particular.
The fire also killed Pete and Fran Gillam, a British couple who lived in Bédar. Police confirmed to the family that her parents did not survive, Danielle Gillam-Kirton, their daughter, wrote on Facebook, and she thanked those who sent love, support and prayers.
Rescuers recovered four bodies from a burned-out car with a right-sided steering wheel, a sign the occupants were British. Charred vehicles lined the road leading out of the village, and authorities confirmed some of the dead were in their cars when they tried to flee. Emergency crews initially recovered 12 bodies burned so badly that DNA samples were required to identify them, and relatives of the missing were asked to provide samples at Bédar’s civil office.
There was one reprieve. Civil Guard officers found two British walkers, a couple caught out on the hillside, alive with burns to about 40 percent of their bodies. The officers re-searched ground already covered and reached them in a ravine just as night fell. The extraction took about three hours, and both survived. Sgt. Pedro Barre, one of the officers, told national broadcaster RTVE that long service teaches officers to double back on terrain already covered.
A Disputed Emergency Alert
Spain’s Es-Alert system, which pushes emergency messages to every mobile phone in a defined area, was never activated. That is not in dispute. What is disputed is whether it should have been.
Antonio Sanz, the Andalusian regional government’s first vice president and emergencies chief, defended the decision from a forward command post in Turre on July 11. He said different parts of the area needed different instructions. “People who had to be evacuated would have received messages telling them to shelter, and people who had to shelter would have received messages telling them to evacuate,” Sanz said. He said on the same occasion that an Es-Alert “could have affected 7,000 residents when we wanted to move out 70.”
Sanz returned to the question on July 23. He argued that the area’s scattered homes and limited access made a blanket alert impractical and that direct, personalized warnings by security forces were better. He said fallen poles had knocked out communications.
What residents got varied. Church bells rang, the town hall sent WhatsApp messages, and the mayor, councillors, volunteers and local police went door to door.
A Reuters investigation published July 22 found warnings reached people unevenly. Five residents told the news agency they received nothing at all. Bob Layton, a retired British technical manager, said that “if I had received any advice to stay in my home we would have been dead.”
Bédar’s municipal emergency plan had last been approved in 2019 and was still being updated. Of Almería province’s 103 municipalities, only 42 had emergency plans at all and just nine met the four-year update requirement.
The first call to the emergency line came at 4:29 p.m., reporting a burning electrical cable. The regional government did not activate the first operational level of its emergency plan until 7:37 p.m.
The Andalusian branch of the opposition Socialist party has pressed for records showing which mobile base stations were working and when, disputing the account that coverage had failed. The regional government has not retracted or qualified its position.
Families Press the Criminal Case
The court admitted eight families of the dead as private prosecutors in the criminal case on August 7, and the arrangement was formalized August 10. Three families attended court in person and five joined by videoconference from elsewhere in Europe. A ninth family’s application was deferred.
One relative told Spanish news agency EFE that his father had faced an “absence of warnings” before the fire reached him.
Relatives formed a group, Help Bédar, to fund independent expert work on fire behavior, warning systems and evacuation management. Five family members run the group, among them Gillam-Kirton and Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt, whose father, Stanislas, was among the Belgian victims.
The group opened a fundraising page on August 22. As of September 24 the appeal had raised about €10,900 of a €100,000 target from 161 donors. “No ES-Alert message was sent to phones in the area. Officials have said residents were warned. Our relatives were not reached,” the page says. It also asks: “One week later, a fire near Madrid burned 27,000 hectares, with over 55,000 people evacuated or confined, and nobody died. Why was Bédar different?”
On September 16 the Socialist Party announced it would join the case as an accusing party. Two days later, the Andalusian Parliament’s governing majority rejected opposition calls for a parliamentary inquiry, arguing the judicial investigation was sufficient. The regional government has instead announced an interdepartmental commission on fire prevention.
On August 19, Gillam-Kirton went to the municipal vehicle pound in Mojácar to inspect her parents’ burned-out car, which had been recovered from the El Curato area of Bédar. The Civil Guard had told her the vehicle had been inspected meticulously and that she would find nothing.
Inside she found multiple bone fragments, including what she described as part of a human hip on the front seat, plus two mobile phones, several sets of keys, jewelry and money. Authorities had earlier given the family a single small bone fragment, which they had cremated at a funeral weeks before. “Then who or what did we cremate?” she said.
She reported the find to local police the same day and was directed to the Civil Guard barracks at Garrucha, where officers suggested the bones were probably animal remains. She had to press repeatedly before they were sent for DNA testing, and no result has been made public.
The family has filed an eight-page complaint against the Civil Guard as an institution, not against individual officers, asking what analyses were carried out. On September 17 a senior officer replied in three paragraphs, offering condolences and stating that the matter had been referred to the investigating court.
Verdonckt found human remains and personal effects — spectacles, shoes, clothing buttons, jewelry and keys — scattered across burned ground at El Curato, where his father died. He reported it to local police, who called in the Civil Guard, and he then guided officers across the terrain himself.
Cause Still Under Investigation
The civil and investigating section of the Tribunal de Instancia in Vera, post 3, runs the judicial investigation, which is under judicial secrecy. The investigation has kept open whether the fire was accidental, negligent or deliberate. No person or company has been named as a formal suspect.
Investigators focused on an inactive private electrical line near kilometer 511 of the N-340A, which once supplied an abandoned restaurant and nearby rural properties. Witnesses reported seeing a cable fall and throw sparks immediately before the fire started.
Endesa says the line was decommissioned in 2009 and was therefore dead. Red Eléctrica says the infrastructure is not part of its network. Court-appointed experts have countered that without live current in the copper, the sparks witnesses describe would be physically impossible. That contradiction is the central question before the court, and it has not been resolved.
Juanma Moreno, president of the regional government of Andalusia, announced on the afternoon of Sunday, July 12, that the fire had been stabilized and its perimeter secured, and authorities allowed more than 1,000 residents back into evacuated villages. Crews did not declare the fire fully extinguished until July 24.
The settled figure for the area burned is about 5,200 hectares (12,850 acres), revised down from the roughly 7,000 hectares estimated while the fire was still active.
Spain recorded its second-hottest June on record in 2026, and the heat was blamed for upward of 1,000 excess deaths. European Forest Fire Information System figures put the area burned nationwide in 2025 at more than 393,000 hectares, the largest such total since 1994. By September 16 this year, Spain had lost a further 296,815 hectares — 44 percent of all land burned across the European Union in 2026.
The central government said in July that it would designate the area as seriously affected by a civil protection emergency, unlocking aid for residents and councils across Los Gallardos, Bédar, Lubrín and Antas. A separate regional aid scheme, offering residential awards of between €2,580 and €15,120, closed to applications on August 24. Spain’s insurance compensation body does not cover forest fire damage, a gap the consumer group OCU highlighted in the weeks after the blaze.
Alex Ellis, the British ambassador to Spain, traveled to Almería in the days after the fire and met affected residents. He thanked emergency services, local authorities and the embassy’s consular team. “I have seen today the terrible consequences of the wildfires which have swept through Almeria,” he said.