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If you have ever driven through the Region of Murcia and admired its pine-covered hillsides, it is worth knowing just how much work goes into keeping them that way. Since 2025, the regional government has invested almost €21 million to tackle the decline of forest land caused by drought, and the scale of the effort is considerable.

 

So far, action has been taken across 11,459 hectares, with 513 people working on the ground every day. That includes 263 staff from forestry companies and 250 from the regional government's own forestry brigades, a group that covers technical support, environmental monitoring, fire brigades and environmental agents. Add in the forest firefighters of the Brifor unit, who work in shifts, and the total forest brigade workforce rises to 270.

 

The work itself is varied and practical. Teams are dealing with pest control, carrying out sanitary forestry work to reduce fire risk, improving access roads and infrastructure, and working on habitat restoration. To get through it all, they have 13 pieces of light mechanical equipment, including brush cutters, mobile chippers and transport vehicles.

 

By the end of 2026, the regional government expects to reach around 11,500 hectares of intervention. But that is only the beginning. Plans are already in motion for a further 6,500 hectares over the coming years, bringing the total intervention area to nearly 18,000 hectares within three years.

 

Looking further ahead, Murcia has a genuinely long-term forest strategy in place. The roadmap stretches 15 years, broken into five-year plans, with the eventual goal of treating the region's entire 148,000 hectares of catalogued public forest.

 

Some of this work has already been funded through nine emergency projects backed by Next Generation EU funds, covering municipalities including Lorca, Alhama de Murcia, Totana, Cehegín, Bullas, Cieza, Calasparra and Caravaca de la Cruz, representing a further €8.3 million in investment.

 

To put the scale of Murcia's forests into perspective, the region has 511,293 hectares of forest land in total, 60% of which, around 308,000 hectares, is wooded. That works out at 27% of the entire region.

 

Within that woodland, the state inventory counts an extraordinary 84 million trees, with Aleppo pine making up 92% of them.

 

Image: Muhammed Fatih Beki/Pexels