Firefighters from across Belgium and several European countries are battling a major wildfire in the Hoge Venen — known in French as the Hautes Fagnes — a vast peatland nature reserve in the far east of Belgium, near the German border. The blaze, which broke out on Friday, has already destroyed around 2,700 hectares of protected habitat, an area comparable in size to the Dutch city of Haarlem, making it the largest wildfire in Belgian recorded history. Local authorities in the French-speaking region of Wallonia have warned the fire remains out of control, with the flames spreading eastward toward the German border.

Around 600 residents from the villages of Sourbrodt and Bütgenbach have been ordered to evacuate, with additional communities placed on standby. On the German side of the border, residents of five villages in the Monschau municipality were also warned to prepare to leave. Belgium activated the EU's civil protection mechanism, prompting Sweden to dispatch two water-bombing aircraft, while the Czech Republic, the Netherlands — which sent two military Chinook helicopters — and Germany also contributed personnel and equipment. Firefighters described the terrain as extraordinarily difficult: the boggy, waterlogged ground forces crews to advance on foot or wait for flames to reach accessible roads before they can be tackled. "You simply sink into it," said one fire commander from the Belgian province of Limburg, whose units joined the effort overnight. Local farmers also arrived with their own water tankers to assist.

What makes this fire particularly alarming is the irreplaceable nature of what is burning. The Hoge Venen is a raised peat bog — a ecosystem fed entirely by rainfall rather than groundwater, normally too wet to catch fire. Peat accumulates at an average of just one millimetre per year, meaning some deposits that are now burning took more than a thousand years to form. Because August has followed an exceptionally dry summer — western Europe recorded its hottest June-to-July period on record, according to the EU's Copernicus climate monitoring service — the peat has dried out at the surface and is now burning underground as well as above it. Professor Kris Verheyen, a forest ecology expert at Ghent University, warned that "the reconstruction of that peat could take decades, and perhaps even centuries."

The ecological consequences extend beyond the reserve itself. The Hoge Venen acts as a natural water reservoir, absorbing rainfall like a sponge and regulating water flow into surrounding rivers and streams. If the peat degrades significantly, that capacity diminishes, potentially altering the chemical composition of local waterways and harming biodiversity far beyond the burned area. The reserve is also home to rare species already under pressure, including the black grouse. A previous major fire in 2011 burned approximately 1,300 hectares, but occurred in spring when the soil was still moist, allowing for relatively swift recovery. Experts fear the current fire, burning deeper into dry peat in the height of summer, will prove far harder to reverse. Millions of euros had been invested in recent decades to restore living peat bog in the area — investment that may now be largely lost. The Belgian king Filip publicly thanked emergency services for their efforts as the crisis continued to unfold.