Massive wildfire threatens Colombia's Villa de Leyva as El Niño fuels record blazes

Smoke has been rolling into Villa de Leyva's central square for days now, thick enough that visitors can taste it. The colonial town, with its cobblestone streets and whitewashed architecture that draws more than a million tourists each year, sits in the shadow of the San Marcos hillside—where a wildfire has already consumed 40 hectares of native forest and shows no sign of stopping. The blaze erupted in central Colombia's Boyaca department, and local officials are watching it with the kind of attention reserved for threats to something irreplaceable.

On Saturday night, President Abelardo de la Espriella took to social media to declare that Villa de Leyva would not face this alone. He promised to mobilize every resource the state could muster to contain the fire and protect what he called a historical jewel and source of national pride. The response has been swift: two aircraft from the Boyaca department government, a military helicopter, and firefighting teams from Bogota—including a contingent sent personally by the capital's mayor, Carlos Fernando Galan—have been dispatched to join local crews from Tunja and Boyaca. The effort is as much about protecting the town's urban center as it is about stopping the flames from advancing further up the hillside.

But Villa de Leyva's crisis is not isolated. Across Colombia, 18 active wildfires are burning simultaneously, according to the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management. The country is in the grip of conditions that have turned the Andean landscape into kindling. Normally, forest fires peak during the dry season in the equatorial Andes—a predictable rhythm that communities have learned to manage. This year is different. A severe El Niño weather pattern, supercharged by the warming effects of climate change, has created something more extreme: record-breaking temperatures paired with a dramatic absence of rain. The ground has been stripped of moisture. Water basins have dropped to critical levels. The vegetation that should be green is brittle and ready to burn.

El Niño itself is a natural phenomenon, a warming of the Pacific Ocean that reshapes weather patterns across the globe. But its effects are not uniform. In the southern cone of South America—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay—it brings torrential rains and flooding. In the north, where Colombia sits, it does the opposite. Rainfall plummets. Clouds fail to form. The normal patterns that have sustained the region for centuries are displaced, and temperatures climb well above what the landscape has known. The heat accelerates evaporation from soil and reservoirs, deepening the drought with each passing week.

What makes this year particularly alarming to climate scientists is the interaction between El Niño and the longer-term warming of the planet. Stephanie Roe, lead climate scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, framed it plainly: El Niño alone can be devastating. But it is unfolding now on a planet that is already warmer than it has been in recorded history. That combination—a natural weather pattern amplified by human-caused climate change—is pushing heat, drought, floods, and fires to levels that ecosystems and communities have never had to endure. Peru and Ecuador have already experienced catastrophic flash floods and landslides. Colombia is experiencing the opposite extreme: a landscape so dry that a hillside above a town of immense cultural and economic importance can become a furnace.

The firefighting effort continues, but the underlying conditions—the heat, the lack of rain, the dry vegetation—remain. Villa de Leyva's smoke is visible from the central square, a daily reminder that even places of historical significance are not immune to the climate extremes that are reshaping the region.