Lockdown in Benahavís lifted following favourable development of the fire, with seven firefighting aircraft now in action

The decision to lift the lockdown was announced on Monday morning by regional minister Antonio Sanz, who was present at the command centre set up at the headquarters of the Andalusian Emergency Group (GREA) in Benahavís.

“Good work overnight has made it possible to lift the lockdown in the town centre of Benahavís,” said Sanz in a post on social media platform X.

The decision to allow residents of Benahavís to leave their homes does not affect residents of three housing estates (Montemayor, La Coja and Benahavís Hills), where the ‘preventative evacuation’ remains in place, according to the head of the Andalusian regional government’s emergency services.

Over 200 firefighters have been working to extinguish the blaze throughout the night, and seven aircraft have joined the effort since this morning. Eight teams of forest firefighters, three Infoca Plan Reinforcement Brigades (Brica), among other personnel, are currently battling the fire, alongside six fire engines, two bulldozers and technical, meteorological, communications and medical units.

The fire remains at emergency level 1, which applies to fires that, while potentially controllable using the standard means and resources available to the regional government of Andalucía, trigger this response due to their scale and the resources required to extinguish them, or because measures need to be taken to protect the population.

However, "the only area where activity continues" at present is at the head of the fire, in the north-west. This is a point situated to the north of the Montemayor housing estate and close to the area affected by the major fire in Pujerra in June 2022. This was precisely the objective set by the emergency management team for Sunday night: that if the fire were to advance, it would do so towards an area that had already been burnt, and which therefore had a lower forest density. “It has been an intense night, as we anticipated, but it has yielded good results,” summarised Sanz.

The regional minister has stated that “the spread of the fire has been contained” and that efforts are focused on “consolidating” the perimeter and “diverting” the fire towards the northern part of Montemayor, although he warned that there may be “flare-ups in the hot spots”. Sanz hopes that “the situation will continue to develop favourably” over the next few hours.