Galicia fires project awarded

Brais Lorenzo has won a 2026 World Press Photo award for “Burned Land,” his photo story on the wildfire season that tore through Galicia in 2025. (worldpressphoto.org) World Press Photo listed the project as a Europe-region Stories winner on April 9, part of the 69th annual contest. The organization said the 2026 awards were selected from 57,376 photographs submitted by 3,747 photographers in 141 countries. (worldpressphoto.org) The awarded image on the contest site shows a man fighting a fire with a branch in Cualedro, in Ourense, on August 15, 2025. World Press Photo said residents used branches, farm tools and household hoses when firefighting resources were stretched. (worldpressphoto.org) The project focuses on Galicia, in northwestern Spain, where fires have become a recurring summer emergency. World Press Photo said more than 200,000 hectares burned across Galicia during Spain’s worst fire season in about three decades. (worldpressphoto.org) Galicia’s regional government maintains annual wildfire statistics, including separate files for 2025, and Spanish coverage of Lorenzo’s award described last summer as the worst fire season in the region in decades. ElDiario.es reported that the August 2025 fires alone burned about 120,000 hectares, citing Xunta de Galicia data. (xunta.gal) (eldiario.es) World Press Photo’s caption and jury note tie the fires to several forces at once: drought and heat linked to climate change, rural depopulation, and forest policies that favored highly flammable non-native trees. The jury said Lorenzo’s series connected the flames to “the human cost of local policy decisions.” (worldpressphoto.org) That framing matches Lorenzo’s longer body of work. The contest biography says the Ourense-born photographer grew up with the smell of smoke every summer and has documented Galician wildfires since 2011. (worldpressphoto.org) Spanish science outlet SINC said the series documents not only the fires themselves but their social and environmental effects. It also noted that Lorenzo, trained in photography, geography and history, regularly works with the news agency EFE and has published in Spanish and international outlets. (agenciasinc.es) The award puts Galicia’s fires inside a much larger competition that also recognized work on conflict, migration and protest around the world. For Lorenzo, the closing image is the same as the opening one: a local resident facing a wall of fire with whatever he had in his hands. (worldpressphoto.org 1) (worldpressphoto.org 2)