Tenerife · Canary Islands · Spain | Historical case study
How much of the 2023 Tenerife fire burned inside Teide National Park? Two figures often appear in accounts of the Arafo–Candelaria fire: 14,751 hectares across the island and 1,235 hectares inside the park. The second area falls within the first. Adding the figures would count the park area twice.
Three dates, three different decisions
The Canary Islands Government’s 28 August bulletin places the start near the TF-523 road between Arafo and Candelaria at 23:36 on 15 August 2023. It dates stabilization to 24 August. Crews were still working toward control: stabilization described how the fire was behaving relative to the control lines.
On 28 August the emergency level fell to Level 1 and the island council took over direction of the response. That date belongs in a chronology of who was in command. It cannot serve as an extinction date. For a reader reconstructing the incident, keeping those two timelines separate matters more than assigning one generic end date.
Reading the two areas
The regional bulletin reported an affected area spanning twelve municipalities. The national parks restoration account identifies the smaller area inside Teide as pine forest and high-elevation shrubland. Dividing 1,235 by 14,751 gives about 8.4% of the incident’s affected area inside the park. It does not give the percentage of the park burned. That calculation would require the park’s total area as the denominator.
What restoration records can show
Inside the park, the restoration programme identifies different threats to recovery. Fencing protects young vegetation from rabbits and mouflon. Barriers made from woody material aim to slow runoff and retain soil. These measures answer different questions: seedlings may escape browsing even where soil is still moving downslope. Judging both interventions by hectares treated would miss that distinction.
A follow-up study could compare seedling survival inside and outside protected plots, and sediment retained above barriers after comparable rainfall. Those are proposed measurements. The ministry describes the works and their purpose; the account cited here does not supply those comparative results.
Evidence limits
The island-wide footprint establishes geographic extent. It cannot establish that every hectare burned equally severely, that every affected hectare needed intervention, or that treated ground has recovered. For a map of the incident, use the full footprint. For an assessment of restoration, identify the treatment sites, their dates and the outcomes measured there.
Sources reviewed: 4 November 2026. Area share calculated by Tecnobosque from the two official figures above.