Wildfires that have killed at least 20 people in southern Chile and wiped out entire towns raged for a fourth day Tuesday, fanned by warm temperatures and strong winds at the height of the southern hemisphere summer.
The blazes started on Jan. 17 in the Nuble and Biobio regions, about 500 kilometers south of the capital Santiago, and have since ripped through an area the size of the U.S. city of Detroit.
Around 1,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, officials said.
President Gabriel Boric said on Jan. 19 that firefighters had managed to contain some of the blazes but that others remained "very active" and that new fires had broken out in the Araucania region bordering Biobio.
Both Nuble and Biobio were declared disaster areas, allowing for the deployment of soldiers who patrolled a desolate landscape of melted cars, twisted metal and houses reduced to rubble.
More than 3,500 firefighters were fighting the fires in Nuble and Biobio on Monday.
Temperatures in the area hit around 25 degrees Celsius on Jan. 19, slightly lower than at the weekend.
Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years, especially in its warmest and driest months of January and February.
A 2024 study led by researchers at the Santiago-based Center for Climate and Resilience Research, found climate change had "conditioned the occurrence of extreme fire seasons in south-central Chile" by contributing to a long-term drying and warming trend.
