Spanish photographers honored
Three Spanish photographers — Brais Lorenzo, Luis Tato and Diego Ibarra Sánchez — are among the 42 regional winners at World Press Photo 2026, underscoring strong Spanish presence in this year’s visual journalism crop. Lorenzo was specifically recognized for his coverage of the Galicia wildfires, including a photograph taken on July 24, 2025 in Cualedro (Ourense). Those domestic stories often become international touchpoints when they capture broader climate and civil‑protection crises. ( )
Spain placed 3 photographers among the 42 regional winners in the 2026 World Press Photo contest, a result announced on April 9, with Brais Lorenzo, Luis Tato, and Diego Ibarra Sánchez all making the list. The overall World Press Photo of the Year will be chosen later, on April 23, from among this year’s awarded photographers. (worldpressphoto.org) World Press Photo is one of the biggest annual prizes in photojournalism, and its 2026 contest is built around work made in 2025. The organization says this year’s winners were selected from stories showing climate crisis, conflict, power, resistance, and recovery across regions. (worldpressphoto.org) The Spanish name that landed closest to home was Brais Lorenzo, who won in Europe in the Stories category for “Burned Land,” his coverage of the Galicia wildfires. World Press Photo says the project includes images from Spain’s worst fire season in about three decades. (worldpressphoto.org) One of Lorenzo’s recognized photographs was taken on July 24, 2025, in Cualedro, in the province of Ourense, where flames and smoke turned a local emergency into an image that could travel far beyond Galicia. Lorenzo is from Ourense and has documented Galician wildfires since 2011, which gave the project the feel of someone photographing his own backyard as it changed. (cadenaser.com, worldpressphoto.org) The background to that award is brutal in numbers: World Press Photo says more than 200,000 hectares burned across Galicia in 2025. The same project links the scale of those fires to drought, heat, rural depopulation, and forest policies that favored highly flammable non-native species. (worldpressphoto.org) Luis Tato’s award came from a very different beat and a very different continent. Agence France-Presse said Tato was recognized in the Africa Stories category for his coverage of Generation Z protests in Madagascar. (afp.com) Tato is Spanish but works out of Nairobi in Kenya, and Agence France-Presse says he is now its chief photographer and photo coordinator for East Africa and the Indian Ocean. That career path helps explain why one country can show up strongly in the winners list even when the stories themselves are spread across the map. (worldpressphoto.org, afp.com) Diego Ibarra Sánchez was honored in the West, Central, and South Asia region for “Hijacked Education,” a long-term project on children cut off from school by war, extremism, and displacement. World Press Photo describes schools in that project as places that have been destroyed, emptied, or even turned into barracks. (worldpressphoto.org) Put together, the three Spanish winners were not rewarded for one national story or one visual style. One photographed wildfires in Galicia, one covered youth protests in Madagascar, and one followed the collapse of schooling across conflict zones, which is a wide slice of what photojournalism now looks like. (worldpressphoto.org, afp.com, worldpressphoto.org) That is why Lorenzo’s Galicia fire images stand out even inside a very international winners list. They are local pictures from northwest Spain, but the judges placed them inside a year defined by climate pressure, public risk, and the struggle to document what happens when a seasonal disaster stops being seasonal. (worldpressphoto.org, worldpressphoto.org)
