Where NASA satellites detected heat near Chefchaouen over the last day or two — read as satellite detections, not incident reports, with the official fire and emergency channels that matter.
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In late summer the forests above Chefchaouen — Talassemtane's firs and the dry Rif scrub — are at their most flammable. This page reads NASA's satellite heat feed for the area around town and shows what it saw over the last day or two. Each row is a detection: a spot where a satellite passing overhead measured heat on the ground. That can be a wildfire, but it can just as easily be a farmer's stubble fire, a charcoal burn, or sun glint off a roof — the satellite can't tell them apart, and it comes with no fire name, no size, and no evacuation order. Treat this as an early hint of where to look, not a report of what's happening. For anything you need to act on, use the official channels below; in an emergency call 150.
No satellite heat detections near Chefchaouen in the last 2 days.
As of 14 July at 12:05, the VIIRS satellite saw no heat within 120 km of town on its latest passes.
A satellite heat map, not an alert system
Through summer the satellite picks up heat somewhere in the Rif most weeks. The great majority are small and deliberate — stubble and scrub cleared after harvest, charcoal fires, roadside burns — not forest fires spreading toward anyone. Faint, low-confidence detections especially are about as likely to be a warm field or a glint as a flame. The pattern worth watching is a cluster of strong detections in the forest that grows day over day, not a single faint dot. When conditions are genuinely dangerous, ANEF says so in its weekly forest-fire risk bulletin — Chefchaouen province is rated most summer weeks, and was placed at high risk in early July 2026.
In mid-August 2025 a fire broke out in the Derdara forest just south of Chefchaouen and burned about 500 hectares — the largest wildfire in Morocco that year — driven by the hot chergui wind after years of drought. Civil protection and forest crews brought it under control. A quiet map today is not a promise: when the chergui blows through a dry August a fire can grow fast, so follow the official channels and don't wait for detections to appear here.
The town's air-and-dust page can already tell you whether today's haze is wildfire smoke, Saharan dust, or clean air — but it can't tell you where a fire is. This page is the other half: it shows where a satellite saw heat, not where the smoke is drifting. On a hazy day, check both — the heat here, the air quality there — and the official channels for anything you need to act on.
Checked 14 July at 12:05. Data: NASA FIRMS (VIIRS) — global near-real-time active-fire detections, 375 m resolution. FIRMS shows heat, not fires: it can pick up controlled and crop burns, flares and sun glint, and very new or cloud-covered fires can be missed entirely.