LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) A woman’s body has been found in burnt-out scrubland near Croatia’s Adriatic coast after a wildfire that the country’s fire chief described as “one of the worst in Croatia’s history” swept through a popular tourist area overnight.
Leaving at least 40 people hospitalised, including ten in intensive care with severe burns and forcing more than 2,000 residents and tourists to flee their homes and hotel rooms in the middle of the night,
Croatian police in Split confirmed Friday that they discovered the body of a woman in burned scrub near the village of Lokva Rogoznica, approximately 30 kilometres south of Split.
A 34-year-old Bosnian national had separately been declared missing by police, though authorities did not specify whether the discovered body was linked to that disappearance. At least one death is now confirmed, with the investigation ongoing.
The fire broke out on Thursday evening near Lokva Rogoznica and rapidly spread toward the nearby tourist town of Omiš, six kilometres away, driven by fierce winds and tinder-dry vegetation baked by weeks of extreme heat.
By the time it was brought under control in the early hours of Friday morning, it had consumed hillsides blanketed in pine forest, destroyed dozens of cars, damaged homes, cafes, restaurants and boats moored on dry land, and turned the night sky red with images broadcast on national television showing firefighters facing walls of flame.
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Around 2,000 people were evacuated from villages surrounding Omiš overnight, with hundreds of tourists among those who fled to emergency shelters set up by the Croatian Red Cross in Omiš, Split and Makarska.
Ana Stejskal, the Red Cross director in Omiš, told national broadcaster HRT that displaced residents and tourists had been provided with beds, showers and food but added: “It’s difficult to predict how long this situation will last.”
According to AFP, there were blackened remains of burnt-out cars along roads near Omiš, some surrounded by silver puddles of metal that had melted under the intensity of the heat and several buildings in the area had been destroyed.
Hospital officials at Split University Hospital confirmed that 40 people had been admitted, including a German and a Polish tourist among the most seriously injured.
Ten victims remained in intensive care on Friday, with the most critically affected patients suffering severe burns.
Croatian Fire Chief Slavko Tucaković called the blaze “one of the worst fires in the country’s history,” telling national radio: “It was frightening even to watch. Many houses, cafes, restaurants, cars, and boats that were on dry land were damaged.”
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Prime Minister Andrej Plenković visited the affected area on Friday to assess the damage and praised the hundreds of firefighters who battled through the night, describing the conditions under which they worked as “extremely dangerous.”
Croatia’s disaster did not unfold in isolation. According to the BBC, by Friday, the wildfires were simultaneously raging across multiple European countries, with Greece, Germany and Croatia all dealing with major blazes at the same time.
In Greece, more than 200 people were evacuated by boat from a beach resort in Agios Vasileios as wildfires swept across the country, while more than 500 residents were forced to abandon their homes near the village of Landa in the southwestern Peloponnese region, an area already devastated by wildfires in previous seasons.
In western Germany, more than 2,000 people were evacuated from the village of Gey, near the Belgian border, after a wildfire spread across more than 200 hectares of forest and entered the village itself.
According to the BBC, firefighters across Europe are facing immense pressure and severe strain on resources as multiple simultaneous major fires consume personnel, aircraft and equipment that cannot be in multiple places at once.
The Croatian fire chief’s assessment that conditions in Omiš were “frightening even to watch” was echoed by emergency service leaders across the continent, who have repeatedly warned that Europe’s firefighting capacity was designed for a cooler, wetter climate that no longer reliably exists.
The Croatian wildfire is the latest chapter in what has become Europe’s most brutal fire season in a decade.
This June and July were the hottest months ever recorded in Western Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The heatwaves that broke records in France, Germany, Spain and the UK in June and July left vegetation across the continent in a critically dry state, creating the conditions under which any ignition, whether from a lightning strike, a discarded cigarette or a power line, can rapidly become catastrophic.
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The European Forest Fire Information System has recorded more than 1,254 wildfires burning over 250,000 hectares of land across Europe since the start of 2026, a figure that was already alarming before Croatia’s coastline caught fire on Thursday night.
Europe’s simultaneous wildfire crisis across Croatia, Greece and Germany is one more data point in a pattern that climate scientists have been warning about for years: warming temperatures do not simply make the world hotter, they make it more combustible, more unpredictable and more simultaneously catastrophic across multiple continents at once.
Nigeria does not face the same wildfire risk as Mediterranean Europe, but the underlying driver, a warming atmosphere saturated with greenhouse gases, is the same one intensifying the floods, droughts and erratic rainfall that define Nigeria’s own climate emergency.
What is burning in Croatia this week is a warning, written in smoke and orange light over the Adriatic, that the world is running out of time to act.
