Spain has Eucalyptus also. Curiously the private plantations burn often less than the public areas adjacent or the nature parks. Talk about weird statistics.
Without a hand that starts the fire, several times, in several places, in the middle of the night, in the most windy and dry day of the year, with devices specially designed for it... without this hand, there is not fire.
Less people wandering around in private areas than public, smoking, making campfires, or generally just throwing flammable litter around?
> Without a hand that starts the fire, several times, in several places, in the middle of the night, in the most windy and dry day of the year, with devices specially designed for it... without this hand, there is not fire.
There are also other explanations that do not require "mafias". Smokers, which many smoke inside the cars, and car/motorcycles backfires can explain many cases.
Pay attention if the fires don't start at Friday and Saturday nights near rural roads.
Like many plants native to fire-prone regions, eucalyptus trees (aka gum trees in Australia) are adapted to survive — or even thrive — in a wildfire. Fallen eucalyptus leaves create dense carpets of flammable material, and the trees' bark peels off in long streamers that drop to the ground, providing additional fuel that draws ground fires up into the leaves, creating massive, fast-spreading "crown fires" in the upper story of eucalyptus forests."
https://www.livescience.com/40583-australia-wildfires-eucaly...
That's at best baseless speculation, and one that doesn't stand to any objective scrutiny. The truth of the fact is that there was no forest fire prevention policy until the deadly Pedrógão Grande fire that left well over 60 dead, and even then the main cause was widespread abandonment of public and private property, where even municipalities failed to comply with the minimum legal obligations of clearing up their property and roadsides.
My point is that fire-resistant species would help reduce fire propagation.
Not even in "Pedrógão Grande fire", only after the fires of mid-October 2017 did the Portuguese government started to react, and by react I mean enforcing the law that has been around for 20 years.