Flocks of nomadic sheep might be Europe’s oldest fix for extreme wildfires
Extensive grazing could help protect landscapes from one of the most destructive impacts of climate change, but shepherds need more support.
Mixed flock of sheep and goats grazing in Sierra de Cazorla, Segura and Las Villas Nature Reserve, Spain’s largest protected natural area. Emerson Mendoza Ayala Share
By Tristan Bove, Emerson Mendoza Ayala, Neal Haddaway
September 21, 2026
This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe and in collaboration with Magma Magazine.
Nunzio Marcelli narrowly avoided a tree root before pulling his car to a stop on a mountainside in central Italy where his sheep have grazed for more than 40 years. The 2,800-meter Majella massif is visible through the sparse tree cover, the snowcapped peaks dominating the landscape.
Marcelli, his 1,500 sheep, 50 herding dogs, and the few dozen people he employs at his agricultural firm in the hilltop town of Anversa degli Abruzzi are some of the last vestiges of a nomadic pastoral tradition pre-dating the founding of Rome. It’s a practice that could also be Europe’s best unheralded tool to curb the extreme wildfires that have ravaged the continent year after year.
Climate change has supercharged heatwaves in the Mediterranean and caused prolonged droughts, leaving vegetation severely dehydrated. Rural land abandonment in recent decades and dwindling pastoral activities have also allowed trees, shrubs, and tall grasses to encroach across grasslands, turning swathes of southern Europe’s countryside into highly flammable tinderboxes.
Scientists and herders say encouraging more extensive grazing can help manage landscapes and stem the tide of wildfires. But the current incentive structure rewards large-scale, intensive operations that can guarantee high yields, rather than the extensive grazing practices that tend to be most beneficial to the land. For pastoralism to survive in modern Europe, shepherds say, it will require subsidies and targeted assistance from national governments and the European Union—support that has so far failed to gain traction among policymakers.
Roving fire brigades
Transhumance—from the Latin trans, meaning across, and humus, earth—refers to the shepherding of livestock between winter pastures at low altitudes or latitudes to summer ones on mountain summits. A form of extensive grazing, where grazers cover wide swathes of land at low intensity, transhumance stands out for its seasonal nature and the long distances shepherds and their flocks tend to travel, traditionally on foot.
Here in the valleys and canyons of central Italy, Marcelli’s sheep remove vegetation that would have otherwise covered everything from the winding track his Jeep barely fits through to the wide clearings free of tall grasses and shrubbery.
“All of this is open because of grazers,” Marcelli said. “It’s the result of an age-old tradition that has kept this territory going for thousands of years.”
But the animals chewing their way across Italy’s mountains—and the goats, sheep, and cows grazing on ancient routes throughout southern Europe—are doing much more than keeping culture alive. The time-honored practice may have also given the land a vital tool to protect itself against wildfires.
“Fire won’t ever come here,” Marcelli said confidently. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for many other parts of Europe.
In 2025, nearly 8,000 wildfires scorched more than one million hectares of land in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System, representing the worst wildfire year ever recorded on the continent. The 2026 season has so far seen marginally fewer fires, but around 650,000 hectares have burned as of early September, more than double the long-term average of the last 20 years.
Despite fewer fires across the continent than the previous year, the 2026 wildfire season has still set records in individual countries, some of which have had to deal with fires of unprecedented severity. In Spain and France, historically destructive fires have burned through around 300,000 hectares this summer. Devastating blazes in July surrounded the cities of Bordeaux in France and Madrid and Valencia in Spain, at one point forcing over 300,000 evacuations in affected areas.
In some cases, these large wildfires ripped through areas once tended by grazing animals. The fire that raged around Bordeaux in July gained strength tearing through the Landes, a man-made forest of monocultured pine trees planted across some 4,000 square miles of land in the 19th century to support the area’s timber industry. The region was formerly a patchwork of marshes and moorlands routinely grazed by local livestock and feral animals, and a stop on ancient transhumance pathways linking lowlands in southwestern France with the Pyrenees mountains.
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Modern forms of intensive grazing can be damaging to environmental health due to overstocking and overuse of static plots of land, but a growing body of research suggests the loss of practices like transhumance could have a similarly detrimental effect. Moving herds through seasonal ranges helps clear up dry vegetation without pushing pastures into an overgrazed state. The pathways carved by transhumant herds over create a system of natural firebreaks that make isolated spot fires less likely to explode into a full-blown inferno.
“You trample an area, you disturb the vegetation, but you let it grow again—and you get this mosaic of different habitats.”
Guy Pe’er, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research
A 2021 report for EU policymakers referred to grazing animals as “cost-efficient ‘fire brigades’” that can help regulate dry vegetation’s buildup and maintain open spaces to act as fire breaks. The report covered all forms of extensive grazing and refers to animals roaming and foraging widely over loosely controlled pastures and rangelands.
As a seasonal variant of extensive grazing, transhumance can also help increase biodiversity, according to Guy Pe’er, a biologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and lead author of the report.
“In transhumant systems, you have very intensive grazing for a short period—you trample an area, you disturb the vegetation, but you let it grow again—and you get this mosaic of different habitats,” Pe’er said.
The consequences of losing transhumant grazers were documented in a 2022 study of the ecological impacts that followed the loss of seasonal grazing in Spain’s Cantabrian Mountains. The researchers found that plots of land deprived of transhumant grazers suffered decreased plant diversity and lower soil fertility, as well as faster encroachment of shrubs and woody plants that can build up into fuel loads for wildfires.
Nevertheless, these practices are in worrying decline in Europe. Although there are some limited policies and funding in place to support young agriculturalists, they are not designed to encourage the most beneficial types of grazing.
Broken incentives
At 1340 meters, in the heart of the Sierras de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas Natural Park, lies the municipality with the highest number of transhumant herders in Andalusia and the largest sheep population in the province of Jaén: Santiago-Pontones.
Before the arrival of winter each year, around 60 transhumant herders drive some 40,000 head of cattle from the Sierra de Segura to the balmy, peaceful pastures of the Sierra Morena, where they graze for about six months. When the temperature starts to rise, they retrace their steps back to the mountains. For more than five centuries, their return has heralded the arrival of summer.
“When it comes to transhumance and generational succession, we are a rare bird in the area, and I would even say at a national level,” Antonio Rodríguez García, mayor of the municipality and a shepherd, explained. Here, “transhumance is a form of cultural resistance.”
The continuation of this practice in Santiago-Pontones is strongly linked to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the bloc’s signature agriculture subsidy scheme, which supports young agriculturalists by providing targeted financial aid and grants to start new businesses. “Many young people have joined farming in recent years thanks to the support available for young farmers,” Rodríguez said. Rodríguez decided to follow in his father’s footsteps when he announced his retirement and swapped nursing for transhumant herding after Covid. He’s now applying to the start-up grant for new young farmers just before turning 40, the age limit.
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“Transhumance is a form of cultural resistance.”
Antonio Rodríguez García, mayor of Santiago-Pontones
But Rodríguez is in an anomaly. The decks are still stacked against traditional shepherds. Common Agricultural Policy subsidies account for 50 percent of farm incomes across the EU, but do not differentiate industrial farming from mobile pastoralism. Subsidy calculations penalize open grazing, meaning that shepherds often earn less by letting animals roam free, according to Júlio Sá Rêgo, a researcher in environmental and rural anthropology in Portugal’s Central region.
New young shepherds soon realize they must overcome countless bureaucratic hurdles, such as ascertaining land ownership, leasing grazing land, and even obtaining aid for disease-related losses—like the 2025 blue tongue outbreak—which discourages them from pursuing shepherding.
“I talk more with the agricultural advisor than with my family,” said Julián López, a 40-year-old shepherd from Cazorla who wanders every day through the municipality’s public lands to graze his flock, instead of moving herds seasonally to the Sierra Morena as his ancestors did, because doing so “is not cost-effective.”
In addition, any earnings from artisanal dairy produce are erased by the grueling, round-the-clock working hours and high systemic risks that transhumant shepherds face from livestock disease and extreme weather.
Physical barriers are also challenging. Fences increasingly enclose land as rural areas are privatized and modernized, while traditional paths become impassable due to overgrowth, deterioration, and neglect.
Some shepherds persevere despite these difficulties, although they may take a few shortcuts.
About 250 kilometers away from Santiago-Pontones, in the neighboring province of Córdoba, the 1,300 sheep belonging to Javier Guerrero Vilches, a 28-year-old transhumant shepherd from Santiago-Pontones, rest in the shade of the olive trees in the Sierra de Cardeña y Montoro Natural Park.
It would take Guerrero between 12 and 15 days to cover the distance from Santiago-Pontones with the flock, whereas he only needs about five hours to make the trip by lorry because traditional transhumance “isn’t economically viable, nor does it bring me any profit,” he points out.
Despite his father’s refusal to let him become a shepherd because “he didn’t want me to spend my whole life feeling miserable, exploited, and penniless,” Guerrero dropped out of secondary school. He now proudly represents the third generation of transhumant shepherds in his family, determined to work towards improving conditions in his profession and putting an end to prejudices against shepherds.
“These social perceptions cross time,” said Sá Rêgo. “They still have the mentality of the flock keeper and discourage their kids from going into pastoralism.”
Some shepherds have come up with creative solutions to make their profession more lucrative. The Italian shepherd Marcelli established an agricultural firm and diversified into an export business and tourism, inviting people to accompany the herd during the day, before a shuttle comes to drive them back to town for the night.
He’s simultaneously preserving the transhumant tradition and helping mitigate wildfires.
In Andalusia, Guerrero has diversified his income, capitalizing on the added value of grazing in olive groves, by selling organic extra virgin olive oil made from local Picual olives packaged in sheep’s wool, and is considering offering ecotourism and gastronomic experiences.
Others are working to improve the structural political and economic situation for shepherds. Mayor Rodríguez said his greatest achievement to date has been securing an agreement with the Andalusian Regional Government to stop charging shepherds for grazing on public land. “It is completely anachronistic that we have been paying around 150,000 euros to clear the 70,000 hectares of woodland we manage to prevent fires,” he said.
Just having shepherds willing to do the job and live in the mountains might make a difference. In 2022, a stray lightning bolt struck a desiccated tree above Marcelli’s ranch. The dried wood ignited, and a fire quickly started spreading. But a shepherd watching a flock of sheep was able to warn the authorities.
Tristan Bove is a freelance science and environmental journalist and photographer. He has written for the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, and the … Read More
Emerson Mendoza Ayala is a travel and environmental investigative journalist and audiovisual communicator from Spain. He specializes in … Read More
Neal Haddaway is an environmental photographer from the UK. He has a PhD in conservation biology and has conducted research in the science-policy … Read More
